Keysnclicks

Holi 2013 Animation

keysnclicks — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:08:14 +0000

Hey everyone,

Sharing the latest animation short I worked on.
Everything including modeling, rigging, animation was done in Maya and rendered with V-Ray. Compositing is done in After Effects. Rendering was completed in approx 12 hours.

Hope you all like it!

Zero G

keysnclicks — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:34:18 +0000

Hey everyone, Lately I have been working on a lot of projects, mostly at the same time. Here is one of the tests we did to visualize color treatment, animation, render times etc. Hope you like it. Created with Maya, VRay and After Effects.

Embed Vimeo without being blocked by ISP’s

keysnclicks — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:22:29 +0000

This post will show you two ways to embed Vimeo videos without getting them banned by ISP’s. Vimeo provides you a couple of options to embed video on your site out of which the latest (as of this writing) is the iframe method.

So you may have a similar code on your website which displays Vimeo video.

Look at the “src” attribute of the iframe. It reads http://…. Now if you change this to https://…. you will get an unblocked video on your website. This also automatically happens if you watch videos on Vimeo.com, after logging into your account, as logged in users get a secure version of Vimeo player.

Another way is to use SWFObject from http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ to embed “https://secure-a.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/moogaloop/5.2.26/moogaloop.swf” version of Vimeo swf player. Rather than how to do this step by step, I am including a zip file with a working example.

Download zip file

Thats it! Happy sharing.

How to watch Vimeo videos in India

keysnclicks — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:54:58 +0000

Hello everyone,

Recently, due to a court order to prevent Piracy, access to Vimeo videos is blocked in India. Now this is frustrating as this is clearly a case of one dirty fish spoiling whole water. Vimeo is a respectable site for sharing works of art and technology from around the world and I hope this ban is removed soon.

Well until then if you want to watch or embed Vimeo videos so that you get past the ban from Indian ISP's, read further for a couple of options available.

As a first option I present you with my Firefox Add-on "Vimeo Unblocker". After installing Vimeo Unblocker, you will be able to view Vimeo videos on Vimeo.com com or any other site with a single click. You can downlaod and read more about the Add-on here: http://www.keysnclicks.com/vimeo-unblocker/

Secondly yo can go to http://ctrlq.org/vimeo/ and paste the video link in text field provided and the video will play on this site.

And if you're up for some fun and have some HTML & Javascript knowledge read ahead...

If you have Firebug for Firefox installed then follow the steps below:

Once you are on a page where there should have been a Vimeo video but now you see this notice "This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications", Right click with your mouse and select "Inspect Element with Firebug". Once Firebug window is up, look for Vimeo video url in the html tab of Firebug.

Notice just above the <body> tag you will find the Vimeo Players link in "src" attribute of <iframe> - http://player.vimeo.com/video/26755....... Click on the link to edit it and change the http to https and hit enter. That is it, now you can watch the video playing.

If you are trying to watch a video on Vimeo.com itself just changing the http to https wont work. You will have to look for <object> element and there you will see "data" attribute containing Vimeo players url something like this - http://a.vimeocdn.com/p/flash/moogaloop/5.2.26/moogaloop.swf?v=1.0.0. Now change the http part to https://secure- and then rest of the url.

Same technique can be applied in Chrome and Internet Explorer by pressing F12 and changing http part.

Now if you want everyone to see your Vimeo videos on your website, well you cant expect everyone to do all this crazy stuff. But you can definately take initiatives on your end and alter the way you currently embed Vimeo videoson your site.

To know more read this post, "Embed Vimeo videos without being blocked by Indian ISP's"

Hope this is helpful to someone!

Ford 1930 Model A Instruments

keysnclicks — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:43:53 +0000

Mars Rover

keysnclicks — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:24:10 +0000

Maya Feature Displacement

keysnclicks — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:15:51 +0000

Many of you may be aware of this but for some it may be helpful someday. While working with displacement maps in Maya if at some point in time you need to see the actual displaced geometry in viewport then you can use convert “Displacement to Polygons” command found under Modify > Convert > Displacement to Polygons.

But this is not the purpose to write this post. Purpose is how can you control the details of the converted mesh. If you need to get a highly detailed displaced mesh then “Feature Displacement” feature comes handy.

Feature displacement section is found under shape node tab of the selected mesh in the attribute editor. To increase the details of the resulting mesh you will set “Initial Sample Rate” to more than 6 which is default.

Combined matte pass using writeToColorBuffer

keysnclicks — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:26:52 +0000

Here’s a way to output single matte pass for multiple objects/shaders using writeToColorBuffer node in Mental Ray. This is handy in situations when you want a combined matte pass for various shaders applied to multiple objects. For e.g: say you have a room where roof comprises of various elements like main roof, fan lights, false ceiling boards etc. Now to separate the complete roof in composite you would want a single matte pass but writeToColorBuffer node takes only single shader as an input.

JS_MultiLayer shader from Jan Sandstörm comes handy in such situations as it allow us to layer multiple shaders. Once we combine all shaders we then feed it to writeToColorBuffer.

There is one more step to do before we can get the combined matte pass. WriteToColorBuffer works for shaders which are applied to objects in the scene but if we apply the combined JS_Multilayer shader to objects then we may not get other required passes like color, master beauty etc. as we want them. So rather than applying the JS_Multilayer shader to objects in scene we plug it in the “shading group” of the shaders for which we need the combined matte pass. Dont worry if you dont understand what this means as I have attached a scene file so you can have a look at the connections.

One thing I noticed is this procedure works better with mia_x, mia_x_passes and JS_Multilayer but somehow doesn’t give needed results with Maya shaders like Lambert, Blin etc.

Download scene file

Get selection’s shader

keysnclicks — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:07:41 +0000

There are times when you want to quickly select the shader applied to the selected object rather than switching between various tabs in the Attribute Editor or going through the numerous shaders in the Hypershade. You can use the following mel script to automate this task.


string $shaderName[] = stringArrayRemoveDuplicates(
     ls("-mat", listConnections( listConnections("-type","shadingEngine",`ls -sl -o -dag -s`))
   )
);
select -r $shaderName[0];

We are using an Array ( $matName[] ) here so that we can select the first shader returned from the list of multiple shaders (just in case) applied to one object.

stringArrayRemoveDuplicates remove all duplicate items from a string array. There will be only one occurrence of each string item in the returned string array.

Hi Honey Willie

keysnclicks — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:59:43 +0000

A funny short film with diverse characters and a suspense…