Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

I can finally talk about something I have been working on in the past two years.  One of the reasons I returned to Crytek was to push the use of game engines in linear content creation like film and television. On Avatar I saw how much time and effort went into layout, blocking, virtual sets, etc. The tools were archaic, the feedback loop was abysmal at times. In games we have to layout massive levels that people can roam through for 8-15 hours or more and CryEngine’s tools are some of the best for that.

I have been working as Product Manager with a small team of great guys, where I basically define the goals and backlog. It’s thrilling to finally get to see things like Catmull-Clark subd in runtime, or multi-channel EXR output, or Alembic support. It’s been really fun to define what the product is and prioritize features largely without external dependencies or politics, I thank Crytek for trusting me to helm such a project.

We had a live demo kiosk at GDC; check out the Cinema Sandbox Website for more info.

I will be speaking at FMX about CineBox and the whole idea of using game engines for previs and virtual production: The Long Road to Film / Game Convergence

I am still finding my feet in Maya, on my project, some files have grown to 800mb in size. Things get corrupt, hand editing MAs is common; I am really learning some of the internals.

In the past week I have had to do a lot of timeline walking to switch coord spaces and get baked animations into and out of hierarchies. In 3dsMax you can do a loop and evaluate a node ‘at time i’, and there is no redraw or anything. I didn’t know how to do this in Maya.

I previously did this with looping cmds.currentTime(i) and ‘walking the timeline’, however, you can set the time node directly like so: cmds.setAttr(“time1.outTime”, int(i))

Unparenting a child with keyed compensation (1200 frames)
10.0299999714 sec – currentTime
2.02 sec – setAttr

There are some caveats, whereas in a currentTime loop you can just cmds.setKeyframe(node), I now have to cmds.setKeyframe(node, time=i). But when grabbing a matrix, I don’t need to pass time and it works, I don’t think you can anyway.. I guess it gets time from the time node.

Here’s a sample loop that makes a locator and copies a nodes animation to world space:

#function feeds in start, end, node
	if not start: start = cmds.playbackOptions(minTime=1, q=1)
	if not end: end = cmds.playbackOptions(maxTime=1, q=1)
	loc = cmds.spaceLocator(name='parentAlignHelper')
	for i in range(start, (end+1)):
		cmds.setAttr("time1.outTime", int(i))
		matrix = cmds.xform(node, q=1, ws=1, m=1)
		cmds.xform(loc, ws=1, m=matrix)
		cmds.setKeyframe(loc, time=i)