Pixel Offset Tool For Maya

This tool presents a simple rig and a Heads Up Display for  measuring the pixel offset in ths stereo pair for 3 points in worldspace. This is very useful for checking stereo to be inside the safe stereo zone, and also to make transitions between shots having different stereo settings.
This should work in many maya versions, since it uses the python api and not the c++ api.

Instalation

1. Unzip the zip file pixelOffset_v0.0.zip.
2. Exit maya (all instances!
3. Copy 'cgipipeline' folder and and '__init__.py' file to C:\Users\Documents\maya\scripts
4. copy 'shelf_PixelOffset.mel' file to C:\Users\Documents\maya\prefs\shelves
5. Start Maya
6. Enjoy! ( Hopefully ;) )

How To Use

After the instalation, you will find a new shelf in your maya sesion, you can start the pixel offset tool by clicking the the button in the pixelOffset shelf.

A window will open, where you have to enter the names of the left, center and right camera.
You can also select the cameras one by one and press the button to de right of the text field.

After having all the fields completed, you have to push the button 'Add pixel offset locators and HUD'. Then 3 locators will appear, that you can move around in the scene, that will be used for measures. Also a Heads Up Display will appear that will reflect the measures for each locator, plus some stereo settings for the camera. I've also added a plane that moves relative to the camara that represents the position of the locator in the camara axis. This is usefull to see what objects are in front or behind that plane. The planes are color coded, background is green, action is blue, and foreground is yellow.

In the HUD, zp is zeroParalax, ia is interaxial, fg is the 'foreground' locator, ac is the 'action' locator (center) and bg is 'background' locator. The numbers presented is in percentage of screen size.

 You can edit the size of each plane with the 'Plane Scale' attribute on each locator.

With the 'Remove pixel offset Hud' you can turn off the HUD but keeping the locators. (you can get the HUD back by hitting the 'Add pixel offset locators and HUD' button again)
The same happens with the 'Remove pixel offset Planes' button, you can remove the planes but keeping the locators.
With the 'Remove pixel offset Setup' button you can remove everything, including the locators.
Hope this is usefull, and please let me know how it goes!

Eduardo.

Folderazo!

Folder and Files template for projects

This simple tool addresss what i think is the most elemental fundation for production pipelines.

Folder and Files naming conventions. This is a starting point on top of wich you can build a lot of stuff to get your studio running better and more eficiently.

This tool works by defining a template first, where you specify the possible project root folders, then you define your assets, their folders and files as relative paths, and with some variables that you define later in the template. The ui of the tool will read this template and put in place the widgets for you to create the projects and assets in a simple way.

You can have as many templates as you want, and you can switch between them.

More help and usage comming soon to this webpage!

ProRes Creator

Hello!
This is the Pro Res Creator Tool webpage.

This tools is intended to convert video or an image sequence to a prores codec on windows platform.
The output is a quicktime movie that will behave as if it was coded on an mac machine.
It uses FFMPEG as its encoder, and is a portable app of 30 something megabytes.

Soon I'll add the full documentation here.
If you are interested in an app like this, please drop me a line to eduardo.grana at gmail

Tools for Catmandu

I'm currently working full time at Catmandu coding some tools, because Catmandu is about to start production on Juan Campanella's first animation movie. I'm doing mostly Python and pyqt scripts (some scripted plugins too) and very little mel.
This is the imdb page for the movie , and this is the website of the company (there in not much info there, but you can check it anyway) .

RZ2 importer script for autodesk maya

Hey, I made this to import 2d tracks ( .RZ2 files )from movimento 1.0,
feel free to use it if you need it!
Of course it's super beta version, documentation is non existing and feedback is super welcome!

eg_movi.zip

Quick help: press the button with the ... to browse for the rz2 file. The List will show you the tracking points you have in the file.
Select the ones you want to import and click import selected, or click Select all to import all listed.
You have options for adding a prefix (in case you want to import some point more than once without having name clashes), scale the movement of the points, change the start frame for the animation, flip y axis (screen coordinates are flipped on y) and you can choose to make locators or trackPoints with the data.
On top it shows the current time unit, if you right click it, you have a popup menu to change it with or without compensating the keyframes (very handy!!)
aaa! almost forgot...
to run it:
source "c:/fullPathToTheScript/eg_movi.mel";
eg_movi;

Cheers!
Eduardo.

Pipeline Tools for Muu Cine.

Muu Cine is one of the biggest advertising studios in Buenos Aires, and they trusted me and Lorenzo Basurto to develop several pielien tools to improve their productivity, and to keep track of their projects. The project was fully developed in python.
You can see who are this Muu people in this link to Muu!.

Rendering tool for Gluko & Lennon

Gluko & Lennon is a great new animation series and I'm happy to have contributed in the making of their first episode! My task was to write a pipeline tool for rendering and managing both the rendered images and the render batch files, handling nomenclatures and paths.
You can see some of the episode in this link to Gluko & Lennon - Volare!.
This is the link to the English version Gluko & Lennon - Volare!.

Gluko & Lennon SPA from Gluko & Lennon on Vimeo.