There’s been no updates on my blog for a while. No surprise because I’m lazy when it comes to blogging. But also in January I moved to Montreal to work as a Character TD at Ubisoft Montreal. It’s been an awesome challenge so far.[video]
There’s been no updates on my blog for a while. No surprise because I’m lazy when it comes to blogging. But also in January I moved to Montreal to work as a Character TD at Ubisoft Montreal. It’s been an awesome challenge so far.
Montreal is a beautiful city, especially now it’s moving, reluctantly, into Spring, but my first Winter was exciting. Probably because I arrived half way through Winter.
The internet is faster, music is half the price on iTunes, the food is great, the coffee is good, and I can watch the American TV channels on cable. Overall pretty awesome.
[video]
My biggest problem with MEL Script is that once I’ve written a function and released it I can’t add any new variables to it. This is an issue when you’re writing rig tools that are used across multiple studios and projects, and then an animator asks for a new addition to the rig.
So late last year I had this idea. What if every function I wrote had an extra input variable, a string that could contain any optional flag, which I can use to add extra options to a procedure without breaking existing uses of it? Inside the function I could specify all my default values, that get replaced if it finds a different value in the string.
I decided that I’m not likely to ever use tilde (~) so I’m using it to identify flags. (Maya’s own functions use the minus symbol, but it’s also used for negative numeric values, so I wanted something I’d never use)
// Create Cube Function has two input strings: name, and optional flags ;
createCube( “testCube” , “~visible 0 ~scale 2” ) ;
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” — Albert Einstein
Stand Up, Sitting Down All Day is Bad For You -
One of my co-workers has started standing up at work, and we all look unproductive by comparison. Well, after I read this article, via Lifehacker, I decided to give it a shot. So far I like it.