Tip of the Week: Test Resolution

Sometimes when you're working on a scene, you don't need your test frames to be full res. For instance, the final output might be at 1080HD, but to speed things up while you're working on things like lighting and shading, you might only need to preview your renders at quarter res.

You could go into the render globals, do the math, and change the resolution - but it can be a pain to have to always be changing it back and forth. And there's also the risk of forgetting to change it back to full res before you submit a render and leave for the weekend.

Fortunately, there's a built in way of doing it. Just open up Render > Test Resolution, and you can tell Maya to render your previews at a different resolution. Renders that you send from the Render View or if you click "Render Current Frame" will use the test resolution. Batch renders will be unaffected.




It's quick, and it's foolproof.

Tip of the Week: Is Mental Ray Missing?

What happened? Did it break? Did I accidentally uninstall it?

Perhaps you've asked yourself this before. You open up the render settings window and try to switch the renderer to Mental Ray only to find it missing from the drop down box. You see Maya hardware and software. Maybe even the vector renderer. But Mental Ray is nowhere to be found.

Is it a bug? Yes and no.

Maya gives you the option of turning different features on and off in the plug-in manager. (Window>Settings/Preferences>Plugin Manager). Mental Ray is one of the features included in the list.


You can turn it on and off manually, but for some reason, it occassionally turns itself off - usually after a crash. (This is a bug that has supposedly been fixed, but I've seen it in every version of Maya I've ever used).

While we're on the topic of missing plug-ins, there's quite a few other features that you can enable or disable in the plug-in menu (such as a variety of shaders and import/export for obj, fbx, and anim), so if something's missing, it's generally a good place to look.

On the other hand, if there is a plug-in that you don't really use or need, keep it disabled in the meantime and save yourself some RAM. For more on that, read this old post on Paint Effects and Dynamics.

2010 Oscar Nominations

This year's Academy Award nominations were announced today. Here are the lists for Animation and VFX:


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
French Roast
Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty
The Lady and the Reaper
Logorama
Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avatar
District 9
Star Trek

Animated films made appearances in other categories as well. The Princess and the Frog received a pair of nominations in the Best Original Song category, snd Fantastic Mr. Fox was nominated for Best Original Score. Up picked up nominations for Original Score, Sound Editing, Original Screenplay, and Best Motion Picture - only the second time an animated film has been recognized in that category. Beauty and the Beast was the first, in 1991.