Daniel Vasquez
Hey Light • Blog
A digital artist specializing in biomedical visualization, experienced in directing and videography, and driven to work with visionary artists and storytellers.
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Technical Notes
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by Daniel Vasquez
Curve Vectors Tool
This script finds a vector from a curve. I needed it for orienting a follice to the same direction as the curve's base, which corresponds to the first two cvs. After writing it, I realized that using edit points (ep) or curve points (u) would give a more accurate direction. Good enough for now, but will rewrite it.
UPDATE: Turns out that I could just use the pymel function tangent to accomplish the same thing (i.e. finding the tangent at a given point on a curve). For example, to find the tangent at parameter 0, which is the start of the curve, execute curv.tangent(0)
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Hair From Particle Paths
I got hooked on my last script (see previous post) and decided to extend it by creating a hair system out of the particle paths. I'll post the script when it's working more smoothly, but here are a couple screencaps.
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Gitting With It
Just learned about Github embedding with Gist. To celebrate the excitement, here are small pymel snippets you may find useful!
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Selecting Vertices Sharing Two Edges
With the mesh object selected,
obj = mc.ls(sl=True)[0]
vertCount = mc.polyEvaluate(obj, v=True)
vertList = ['{0}.vtx[{1}]'.format(obj,vert) for vert in range(vertCount) if len(mc.polyInfo('{0}.vtx[{1}]'.format(obj,vert), ve=1)[0].split(':')[1].split()) == 2]
mc.select(vertList)
# Result: u'VERTEX 302: 506 489 484 485 \n' #
UPDATE: A vertex sharing two edges is called 'winged'. Here's another way to select winged vertices using PyMEL (as pm)...
obj = pm.ls(sl=True)[0]
vertList = [obj.verts[v] for v in range(len(obj.verts)) if len(obj.verts[v].connectedEdges()) == 2]
pm.select(vertList)
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Cache Cloud Is Out
Finally posted my script! It's a utility that creates Maya Particle Disk Cache (PDC) files from a sequence of point cloud data. You can find more information here. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
UPDATE: I modified the script so that it contains more classes and documentation (v0.9.0). Unfortunately, it's almost twice as slow as the original release (v0.8.4). Feel free to download the code from my website: http://folio.heylight.com/#958712/Code
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Cache Cloud finished
The past couple of weeks I've been working on a python script that I named Cache Cloud. With all the point cloud data being generated with Kinect hacks and 3D scanners, I thought this would be a useful Maya utility. It writes Maya Particle Disk Cache files using an animation of point cloud data. It's finished, but I'll post some sample videos before releasing the script within the next couple of days. Thanks to this video, I was inspired to write Cache Cloud. Next I'd like to write another one to make nParticle cache files.
UPDATE: I added another feature that removes zero-value points; and cleaned up some code which is now making it twice as fast to process.
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
Importing Point Cloud Data
I was inspired by the making of a music video and wanted to try the same thing using their data with Python in Maya. I also ended up trying it with the House Of Cards data. Eventually, I'll make a GUI that allows for easy point cloud data import into Maya. I wonder how this data can be used for polygon modelling - something else to try.
Posted
by Daniel Vasquez
