FX

This is a story about my journey in solving a problem at work involving curves. The solution seemed really simple at first, but because of a stupid Maya issue, this turned into me having to rewrite the tool 3 times before I discovered a surprising solution.

The Problem: #

Because we rely heavily on the process of importing Illustrator .ai files into Maya as nurbsCurves, we constantly have to deal with curves that intersect themselves. This is a result of the curves having been hand drawn originally in the art department, and they posed issues during rendering after being planar-ized.

I recently did an interview with my friends on their show, Film Jam. Its a podcast dealing with the film industry from the perspective of 3 guys working their way up the ladder. Fantastic show up ’till this point. Hopefully I don’t break the cycle

Please make sure to leave a review about the show via iTunes!

Episode #20 #

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AtomSplitter has been updated to v1.5, available through cmivfx.com

AtomSplitter (chanToFbx) has been updated to v1.2, available through cmivfx.com

I had received a mailing list email from cmiVFX, where Chris Maynard was challenging the community to write a tool that could convert a nuke camera .chan file to a functional FBX format. This was apparently meant to compliment the new 3d camera tracker in NukeX. So I decided to take on the challenge.