Implementing RV in Maya as a Sequence Viewer

You migth wonder how the hack maya can call RV to play the image sequence right after the playblast. It is quite simple. You have to set it in the Preferences window (Window menu / Settings/Preferences / Preferences).

Below the Image Sequence in the left text field enter the file path of the rvpush.exe. The Optional Flags should be this:

-tag playblast merge %f

Source

Ideas for Maya - Search and highlight items in Attribute Editor

As all maya user know that there is a forum where we can share ideas about maya. We can pressure the developers to pull themselves together. So please vote for this idea. It is really important for you and me and the community and for the country, of course.

Search and highlight items in Attribute Editor

This is the base forum:
Ideas for maya
And there is another:
Small annoying things to fix in maya

I just wonder there is no "big annoying things to fix in maya" forum. I would have a couple of hints :)

Maya Bug - UV Set renaming

Okay, it might not be a bug we can call it feature :)
When an object has a history and you would like to rename the current UV Set it will produce error.

Case one:
There will be a new UV Set with the name you just gave.

Case two:
The current UV Layout will disappear

Case three:
Maya crash

Case four:
I had a situation when the unwanted new UV Set had a new UV layout as well.

And you should know you can't undo these operations. You definitely can't undo when maya crashes.

Fortunately if you delete the history before renaming it will work.

Nuke - Read Node - Image Sequence Length

Useful thing to display on read node the length of the image sequence. I guess the easiest way to do that is to use a TCL expression:

 [ expr [value last] - [value first] ]  

You can do it fancy way:

 length: [ expr [value last] - [value first] ]f  

On read node it will look like this.

How wonderful it is.

Maya Bug - displayColor in maya 2015

Let's call it bug. Before maya 2015 SP5 we used maya 2012 in the studio. I don't know which version is the first where this "feature" was added to maya.
If I run this line it produces RuntimeError:

 cmds.displayColor("headsUpDisplayLabels", 16, dormant = 1)  

The funny thing is it changes the color but produces error. So I can handle it with exception.

 try:  
   cmds.displayColor("headsUpDisplayLabels", 16, dormant = 1)  
 except RuntimeError:  
   pass  

I know what you are thinking: Holy crap!

So is there something I don't know? Or what?

Maya (2013+) - imagePlane issue

I had trouble with imagePlane in maya 2015. As far as I know it is changed around maya 2013. ImagePlane now has a transform node so it looks like a standard object. You can create it from the menu: Create / Free Image Plane.

The strange thing is that when it is attached to a camera. It looks like a hierarchy (see below)

but it can't be unparent or reparent. So there is a special connection. In nodeEditor it also looks like a typical hierarchy where the transform node does not have any connection.

Only thing which can refer to some special condition is found in the scriptEditor when the imagePlane is selected:

select -r CameraShape->imagePlane1 ;

I experienced this syntax with positionMarkers. Actually I wrote about it before.

That is how I find out there is a term of underworld nodes in maya. You can read about it here or a more here. Consider underworld node as a component like a NURBS CV and it will explain why it can't be unparented for eg.

So...we can create an imagePlane with MEL command (since maya 2013) like this:

imagePlane -name "myImagePlane" -camera "CameraShape";

And we can redirect" an existing imagePlane to another camera with the edit flag:

imagePlane -edit -camera "NewCameraShape" "myImagePlane";

I found the easiest way to get the imagePlane from the camera is to call this:

listRelatives -allDescendents "cameraShape"

Digital Production Pipeline

Literally the best video on youtube. I think don't have to append anything to this.