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Lining up texture locators

Most people think that Texture Locators are just those widgets that get in the way while you're trying to work on your scene, but James Darknell takes some time to explain how they work and offers a different way to quickly align them to your item's surface.

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Aligning silhouette people to the Camera

Description

Architectural visualization is often known for its silhouettes of people going about their day. These 2D stencil images can be downloaded from the 'net, or from the MODO asset share site. When it comes to changing camera angles though, it's not necessary for you to go around and tweak each person so that they remain aligned to the camera. Here's a trick I saw Brad Peebler do a few years back.

Step-by-Step

  • Under the Animate tab at the top..
  • in Item mode, select the silhouette Mesh, then Shift-select the camera
  • click on Direction Constrained in the Modifier section

 
Render-Backwards                

You'll notice then that when you move the camera, the 2D Item Mesh will always align to the camera. However, one thing that you probably won't want it to do is, tilt when you move the camera up or down. You just need it to move on the Y-axis only

Render-Backwards
             
  • On the righthand-side, under the Properties tab..
    • click on the Direction Constraint tab
    • click on Add output Options
    • change the Opacity on both the X and Z axes
 
Forum Link http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/training/view.aspx?id=483
Source  Brad Peebler
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How to create condensation

Description

In November 2014, I had the privilege of organising and attending the SWEDEN LOVES MODO event in Gothenburg. I learnt a lot that day, but the one thing I took away and wanted to be able to reproduce when I got back home was an example from a presentation by Paulo Madeira on how to quickly create condensation / water droplets on the outside of an object, like say, on a can of coke. 

Now, if you have tried this exercise yourself before (or using a preset from the Asset Share site), you'll probably recall that it took a lot of resources, and your render times probably went through the roof. Paulo's method takes all those headaches away with a few clever tricks he's come up with. 

Step-by-Step
 

In Paulo's example, he used the Chameleon preset that comes with MODO. So for the purpose of this exercise, we will too and assume you have setup your environment and lighting. 

  • Drag in the Chameleon mesh preset.
  • In the Shader tree, delete the preset textures that came in with the mesh, but keep just the 'Chameleon on Branch' folder.
  • [dcs_emptyspace h="20"][dcs_emptyspace h="10"]Create a new material and set it to a vibrant colour.
  • Right-click and duplicate the Chameleon Item Mesh and rename it Droplets.
  • Apply a white material to the Droplets mesh and call it Condensation.

As there are now two meshes located in exactly the same space, turn off the original Chameleon. You will then see just the droplets material.

  • Inside the Condensation material, go to Add Layer and insert the Pebbles texture (under Enhance:MODO Textures, Noise, Pebbles). The white areas will be where the droplets will appear on the mesh.
  • [dcs_emptyspace h="20"]“Pebbles-Texture"</span></li><li style=" width="“294"
  • " height="“352"
  • " />[dcs_emptyspace h="20"]To resize the droplets, go to the Texture Location tab under properties, and change Size X, Y, Z to 15 mm each.
  • Under the Condensation Material change the Displacement Distance to 2 mm.
  • Change the effect of the Pebble texture from Diffuse Color to Displacement.
The Pebble texture covers the entire mesh, however, you only want the droplets themselves to be visible, so you will need to make those parts that are not actual bubbles, invisible (i.e. the areas which lie flat against the skin).
  • Duplicate the Pebbles texture, Invert it, and then change the Effect from Displacement to Stencil.
  • With the Pebbles/Stencil effect texture selected, under the Texture Layers tab, increase the Bias to 100% to make the transition of the edges of each droplet sharper so that they touch the skin surface.
  • Turn on the Chameleon mesh to view the results so far.
  • To make the droplets transparent, apply a Water preset material (i.e. remove any displacement or bump layers) to the Condensation material. Drag it below the two pebbles textures.
  • Change the Displacement Distance to 2 mm
To make the Chameleon metallic like Paulo did, change the material to 0% Diffuse, check Conserve Energy, Specular 20%, reflections 80%, check Blurry reflections.
URL  https://youtu.be/aOoUJP94QEo
Source (Sergio) Paulo Madeira (Madeira3D)
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How to 'playblast' an animation

Description

Before you go wasting a heap of time rendering out an entire movie in final quality without even knowing whether it'll work, I suggest that you first render out a lower-res version. In Maya this is called a Playblast.

In modo, I could never remember how to do this. That's why I am posting it here because I am sure a lot of other people either don't know about it, or else, cannot remember where to find it either. But beware, it won't be a nice looking render. It will look just like your viewport, including lights, camera and locators. It's basically so you can check your composition and timing

An alternative lo-res solution, is to render out your animation with a capped time limit. This will look more like a draft version, and can be especially helpful if you know your scene is going to take say 12-24 hours to render properly - and especially if you know things will more than likely need to be changed, but you just don't want to waste all that time waiting at this point, so you could set it up for say 6 hours instead, so that it can be done say over night.

http://www.alphageekgirl.com/?p=1065
Step-by-Step
    • Under the Animation Tab, right-click in the viewport and select 'Record OpenGL to Movie'
Version   MODO 701 / 801
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Resize the camera icon

If you add an object, sometimes that camera just is a little too big for the scene, especially when getting in close. Or by the same token, if you've got a really large object, your camera is almost invisible; it's too tiny. So under the Display, with that camera selected, there is the Size. This is the view size; it's not the actual size of your renderer or anything else--it's the size of the camera icon. 

Resize camera icon to relative

So you can change that depending on your scene, and what I've often told people is just set it to 0 and it stays relative to your zoom. So notice the camera pretty much stays the same size, whether you zoom in or out, and that's really kind of nice. So I always know where it is. If I zoom out really far, my objects are hard to see, but because I have this size set to 0, I can always find my camera. So, something to think about when you are building larger scenes.

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