Butters Tech Art Blog.

This article is specific to Maya 2012, I have also created an alternate tutorial for Maya 2009 (32bit) Developers

In this multi-part tutorial we’ll be covering two main areas, embedding .Net forms within Maya and extracting Maya UI components and embedding them within your .Net dialogs. To get this to work we will be exploiting the windows messaging system and as a result, this will only work on Windows based systems. This technique is not exclusive to Maya and can be used for many other applications and has saved me on many occasions. Please understand that this tutorial is aimed at intermediate users of .Net and Maya Python scripting, as there will be some C# code used to interface with the windows messaging system and Python code to load the .Net windows within Maya. If you want to learn more about the following concepts you can check out the Addition Resources I have included.

Read the rest of this entry »

This article is specific to Maya 2009, I have also created an updated tutorial for Maya 2012 (64bit) Developers

In this multi-part tutorial we’ll be covering two main areas, embedding .Net forms within Maya and extracting Maya UI components and embedding them within your .Net dialogs. To get this to work we will be exploiting the windows messaging system and as a result, this will only work on Windows based systems. This technique is not exclusive to Maya and can be used for many other applications and has saved me on many occasions. Please understand that this tutorial is aimed at intermediate users of .Net and Maya Python scripting, as there will be some C# code used to interface with the windows messaging system and Python code to load the .Net windows within Maya. If you want to learn more about the following concepts you can check out the Addition Resources I have included.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a compilation of some of the Maya tools I have created and was able to show. 3dsMax reel still to come.

If you want more details, check out the videos section.

Language: Python, PyMel

Summary: This Iterates through all the selected object materials and creates optimized hypergraph materials,  material definition and shader files. These can then be used directly by the game engine.

Language: Python, PyMel

Summary: This script will take a mesh that has been painted in conjunction with the multimaterial.Fx shader and breaks it up into a base layer and top/blend layer. The appropriate materials are then assigned to the parts to optimize render cycles.