Maya Discovery - Large distance from origo cause skinWeight problem?!

Achtung, achtung! Alarm, alarm! Riadó, riadó!

I found a very strange behavior of maya. I created a simple rig used smoothBind skin. Everything is fine until I place the character to large distance from the origin, let's say x: 150000, y: 80000, z: -32000 and I turn on subdivision (pressing 3 key) to see a smooth mesh.

Here are the example pictures:

I have the feeling that skinWeight normalization results this, but no idea hot to fix it.

Maya Fluid - Losing color

If we use color method: dynamic grid to emit colored fluid (from a textured surface for eg.) the color of the fluid is getting grayer and grayer during the simulation. So we lose the emitted color sooner or later.

So what is going on in the background:
Since we use dynamic grid on color every voxel get an rgb value. It seems 0.4, 0.4, 0.4 is the default or something like that. We can check it like this: getFluidAttr -at color -xIndex 0 -yIndex 0 -zIndex 0. The simulation emits color with density but the remaining voxels (the empty ones: means no density) still has the default color. So during the simulation the emitted color is mixing with the default color and that means the fluid is turning to this default color gradually. There are two attributes in this context: Content Details / Color / Color Dissipation and Color Diffusion. Unfortunately the default value is 0 for both. So we can only increase the effect of loosing color.
Since there is no option to set no value on each voxel (it's not 0,0,0 bec. it means black) it is necessarily to lose the emitted color.
The only way to avoid gray color is to "overload" fluid color. We can emit color values like r:1 g: 5 b:2. Of course it is not an ultimate solution but works fine.

Linear workflow

I can't tell that I'm the grandmaster of this topic so rather to tell you the ultimate truth I just collect information about the topic.

http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/tutorials/what-is-linear-workflow-and-how-can-it-help-your-renders-look-better/

http://www.seazo.no/linear-workflow

http://www.davidfleet.com/tutorials/linear-workflow

http://renderman.pixar.com/view/LinearWorkflow

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-256-beta/color-management/

This cmivfx release is quite comprehensive:
http://cmivfx.com/store/332-Nuke+Color+Masterclass+Part+01
So it is not just about the linear workflow but colors. Explained within The Foundry Nuke framework.

Maya Fluid - Checking turbulence and fields

I have always had trouble with adjusting frequency of the Turbulence attribute on maya fluidShape or on a turbulence or volumeAxis field.

Then I find the ultimate solution. Because simulation of a 3D container can be really slow I create a 2D container with Base Resolution of 200. I disable any other simulation so it can be quite fast (usually real time). The Velocity Draw option is good to see the length of the velocity vectors but not that useful to see the scale of the turbulence texture.
We can map the color ramp like this:

And choose Speed as a Color Input. Do the same for opacity.

For the sake of the demonstration I set up a turbulence field for to fluid with these settings:

Play the animation and there it is. Almost like a Thomas Ruff picture.

In motion:

So after I adjusted the field I can apply on other fluids. Keep in mind volumeAxis field is a special to utilize built in turbulence because the size of the pattern depends on the size of the container. If you scale a turbuneceField it has no affect on the size of the pattern.

RV Player - Comparing Images

As we all know Tweaksoftware's RV is more than "just" an image sequence viewer. We can compare images with wipes. If we open an image sequence and drop another image sequence on  RV it shows up an option to add as a source to the session or as a layer.

In this case we add as a source. We can find out whats going on the background if we switch to stack mode (X hotkey). Double click on Defaul Stack enables to view the two (or more) image sequences in the same time. Of course they overlap each other so we have to activate wipes by pressing F6.

Now we can grab any part of the frame of the image to crop and see what's going on behind it. Below the Inputs tab we can change the order of the image sequences. That basically means the top sequence in the list is on the top of the screen as well. I put two different image sequence in RV to demonstrate the wipe/crop.

Pressing F7 displays the Info Stirp which is helpful to infidelity the image sequences.

RV is so sophisticated even if the sequences have different start frames it can be corrected by one click (actually it is two). In stack mode on Edit tab there is an option Align Start Frames. If it is turned on all image sequences will start on the same frame.

Customizing RV player - Sequence From File

As a world famous image viewer and sequence player Tweaksoftware's RV has to be revealed. There are several option usually have to set.

First of all Sequence From File option which can be set on Preferences / Packages is to allow RV to grab an image sequence from a directory rather than a single frame.

The default option to grab sequence is to drop the folder on RV. If the folder contains more than one image sequence RV paste them on the timeline following each other.
If we use another software to view still images (my personal preference is IrfanView) we have to run RV other way. However we don't want to do it every time from the Desktop or Start Menu. It is much easier to put RV icon on the Total Commander toolbar. In this case drag and drop works fine.

Commercial - SOuP

It is important to have paid ads for blog writers. Unfortunately this is an unpaid commercial. But it is worth it.
I have to tell since I know Maya SOuP my life has been changed :)
Around 2005 I switched from 3ds Max to Maya because I felt in 3ds Max had limited capabilities. Since I used Maya I had lot of situation when I felt the same. And of course lot of people talking about Houdini as the final solution for everything. Then I met SOuP and it was a ligth at the end of the tunnel.
So what is SOuP?
Basically this is a set of nodes / tools to extend maya capabilities. The main focus that we usually call procedural workflow.
Here is a website:
http://www.soup-dev.com/

I use SOuP for fun and I had production experiences as well. I'm going to write more about this soon. I just want to draw your attention to this:
Ideas for Maya

If you don't know about this forum you should check it (if you use maya at all). I linked the top ideas and you can see I'm not the only one who excited about SOuP.