More Atlas stuff

So as I "promised" in the previous posting, I've decided to post some more tutorials I made during the production of Atlas. The two I'll feature are: a set of instructions I provided with two MEL scripts I wrote for selecting Atlas and Robofish's control curves, and a tutorial on rendering occlusion passes a particular way for a reason I'll describe in a caption below the image. Enjoy!

Character MEL GUI

So, this was one of my first times working with MEL scripting.
Looking back, I realize how primitive that character "GUI" was.
Still, it was a life saver (at least for me) during animation!


Rendering an Occlusion Pass
Before this film, none of us had experience with rendering passes.
I made this tutorial because nobody had been able to leave their
machine batch rendering all their passes due to the fact that the
occlusion pass would create an undesirable result due to a bug
with the visibility of objects in Maya 8.5. With this "ghetto"
technique, one was able to leave all their render layers to
batch render overnight, making things move much more
efficiently. I was quite proud of discovering how to do this
until I later learned a way to do it with half the work,
and within the Maya terminal so you didn't even need to
have Maya open. Oh well, it's all about learning, right?

It's pretty amusing to look back at these images and see the thought process going through my head only a few months ago, and how much I learned from those experiences. Growth is always a good sign (with the exception of tumors...)!