Maya – Studio EB

Maya/Clarisse Bridge 2.0

April 12, 2021

If you’re used to working in Maya and want something to help you port over files from it to Clarisse this tool is awesome.

Muhammad Etman created it. Here’s the gumroad to purchase if you like what you see. It’s $70 but for what it does it could really speed up your workflow into Clarisse.

What’s great is you can still set things up in Clarisse as you’d normally do but now you have the ability to just send over files you want from Maya easily. Update a camera in Maya, click to send over the camera. If you have a huge geometry set you want to port over now it just takes the push of a button to send it over. Now, you can manually setup your shaders in Clarisse or you can assign an arnold shader in Maya and port that over. Super handy.

Here is a great example of using it for a large scene.

Here’s the UI for it (you can set it up in different viewing modes)

Select the elements you want to port over, click “add” and then send it over to Clarisse. It’s that easy.

Maya file:

Simple click to send over the camera, light, and geometry with shaders

Clarisse file after sending over elements (3 clicks later):

Pretty slick and simple.

Take a look at it and see what you think.

Dengar on Watch

January 24, 2021

So here’s a little sketch I did using Maya with Arnold. I wanted to play with lighting scenarios and the Lighting Filters I mentioned last week.

I was originally inspired with this piece by trying to pay homage to the 19th century artists, like Jean-Leon Gerome and Ludwig Deutsch. They were part of a movement called Orientalism, which was a depiction of the Middle East thru artists from a Western culture’s perspective and interpretations.

I began researching Star Wars related elements. I wanted to incorporate, specifically a bounty hunter, but with all the attention to Boba Fett with the amazing Mandalorian I chose a more obscure one with Dengar. A friend, Brian LaFrance pointed me to a great reference gathering tool Pure Ref. You can create your own pin board of various references easily.

I was able to find low resolution models on RenderHub. There were a bunch of free Star Wars characters from a user, Rip Van Wrinkle.

From here, it was trying to figure out a layout and characters to support my main character, Dengar. For some characters and environments I swapped out textures, used megascan textures. I combined some characters together (made a jawa out of the emperor, etc).

Then just played with mood using different lights in Arnold.

It was a fun exercise. Now onto the next piece.

Arnold Standard Surface Shader Basics

January 11, 2021

I’ve gotten a lot questions from students starting in 3d about setting up a shader properly. I wanted to just go thru the process of setting up an Arnold Standard Surface Shader in Maya.

Hooking up a Megascans brick texture on a sphere with Albedo, Roughness, Normal Map, and Displacement maps. Nothing fancy just some fundamentals.

Utopia Demo

May 25, 2020

I had the honor of giving a demo at University of South Florida St. Petersburg at the beginning of the year. This is one of the demos I made that weekend. Had a fabulous time with the students.

During the long weekend I spent a couple hours touching it up. I have a FREE version of the demo here: https://ericbouffard.artstation.com/store/JXpy/kitbash-demo

Big thanks to John Stanko for asking me down to give the lectures and demo. Hope you enjoy the image.

Time lapse of a Pose

February 2, 2020

Here’s a time lapse of a pose I did showing some workflow with Daz Studio, Marvelous Designer, Maya and a little of Photoshop. Continue reading “Time lapse of a Pose”

Adobe Fuse and Mixamo

January 23, 2020

I’ve heard of Mixamo for character cycle animations but had not heard of Adobe Fuse. In it you can create your own characters and import cycle animations from Mixamo. Continue reading “Adobe Fuse and Mixamo”

Maya Re-pathing Texture links

January 5, 2020

We’ve all had it happen. You download a 3d asset or get a file from a friend, and all the texture links are broken. Using the “File Path Editor” can fix all of the textures links at once.

Speedtree and Redshift

September 2, 2019

Let’s take a speedtree pine tree and export it to Maya. We will also change it’s shader to a Redshift material and make a low resolution version and variant versions as well.

Cryptomattes

July 29, 2019

I’ve heard of Cryptomattes a lot lately. My friend, Paul Rivera, first mentioned it to me for Clarisse and loving the ease of use. Then literally the next day in a tutorial I heard about them. And then a co-worker mentioned them about if we’d looked into them at my work.

So I decided to dig into it a little. Cryptomatte is a tool created by Psyop studio as a way to automatically generate ID mattes using information available at render time. It works with motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. It was presented at Siggraph 2015. This tool has already been picked up by multiple studios and various packages. The nice thing is Psyop has kept this an open source tool. Here is a good intro to them: PSYOP releases Cryptomatte

So far, Clarisse, V-ray, Katana, Maya, Houdini, Blender, Renderman, Redshift, Arnold, Nuke, Fusion, and After Effects can use it.

You can download it on GitHub

It’s super easy to install in Nuke. Takes only a few seconds to setup.

Here’s a Redshift tutorial that was useful: Tutorial #15

A cool update to Cryptomatte looks like their’s a new release of OpenEXR plugin for Photoshop: EXR-IO 2

I’ll be digging into it more over the coming months.

Project Icarus

June 30, 2019

This was a fun little concept solely to start messing with Marvelous Designer. Granted it’s a very simple use of Marvelous. I was thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark Pangrazio shot, a little of Hal from 2001, and Timeless show.

I used Maya, Marvelous Designer, Arnold Renderer, and Photoshop. Here’s a quick breakdown of my process.

Studio EB

Eric Bouffard Website

Category: Maya