Just a little Maya tip here if you have Maya 8.5 or later.

If you need to make some calculations and don’t want to go find your calculator of choice you can use Maya to calculate stuff for you. First, make sure you have python active in the command line (bottom left text field).



If it says MEL, just click it and it should switch to Python



Then you just type in what you want calculated, for example if you type in “4+4″ and then hit control-enter, then the results pops up in the command response window. Easy.

IMPORTANT NOTE
To use Python as your calculator you have to remember that if you are using division remember to type the number you want to divide as a decimal number (like 5.0 instead of 5) otherwise you’ll get a rounded down result. 5/2 gives you 2 and 5.0/2 gives you 2.5. This obviously doesn’t matter if you are adding, multiplying or subtracting.

Well, it’s been pretty quiet around here for the last couple of weeks (months?) but now something happens; a new mel script.

sjtNotes is a supersimple script that simply allows you to have some notes inside your scene that are saved along with your scene file. The script is ridiculously simple and opens this window:



Then you type your notes and hit “Save & close” and then run the script again and edit those notes and again save and close. You get the drift …

Anyway, here’s the link to this awesome script:

sjtNotes v1

If there is anything wrong with this script or you actually can use this then please let me know.

In other news I’m just busy working on my demo reel at VFS mostly spending my time rigging and learning stuff about maya that I didn’t know, like the deformation order, which I like a lot and has saved my ass on one occasion. Oh, and I’m dabbling with RenderMan, it. is. awesome. (so far at least).