Nuke shotgun integration
During my collaboration with studio 400A, I'm developing pipeline tools as the studio is moving to shotgun. to deliver the shots, studio requires artists to have a slate, showing specific information regarding each shot. I've extended the old slate tool to extract all the information possible from shotgun database .
Artists after creating the slate node, are asked to log into their shotgun account. my tool then extracts the projects and shots they are working on and then fills the slate information based on the shot they choose.
I am not Vietnamese
I was lucky enough to be a compositor in the collaborative visual effects project for "I am not Vietnamese" a short film directed by Shahaub Roudbari. Lead compositor in this project was Ryan Bauer, and we worked under the supervision of Vince De Quattero.
"I am not Vietnamese" - Clip55 Breakdown from Ali Poursamadi on Vimeo.
The challenge for me in this shot had been creating a clean plate to cover the shadows of the tent in the middle of the shot and the camera dolly track on the ground.
mergeLightSphere Tool
Among the tools you saw in the early version of FluxHoudini, there's this tiny tool called mergeLightSphere tool. this tool is essentially a flexible multi-Boolean (multi Cookie, OK) . but how does it work ?
Houdini's built-in cookie operator gets unhappy and red when geometry is missing on any of its inputs, so if You want a flexible tool that cooks no matter what, you need to give the node placeholder geo when geometry is not present in the input connection; another way to do it would be to Skip the cookie altogether if there is no input. I combined both approaches. the first merge node merge1 makes sure that the first input has some geometry in it )at least a single point; DOT), then down stream, the switches like switch1, bring cookie nodes in the network only if there is geometry present on the input connectors of the mergeLightSphere node. To achieve this, I've used a very simple python expression on select input parameter of the switch node:
len(hou.node("..").inputConnectors()[1])
Moving pivots in maya/mel
Some times there are situation where you have plenty of objects and you wish to anchor them on the ground, like plants, poles , dishes, ... . In these situations it helps if their pivot is in the middle of the bottom plane of their bounding box because you can then snap the freely onto the ground plane or table or what ever geometry you want to use as the base. This tiny script moves the pivots of the selected objects to the bottom center of their bounding box.
// set pivot to the middle and // bottom of bounding box // (c) Ali Poursamadi, 2012 // www.eldernewborn.com string $allObjects[]; // list of selected objects string $obj; // selected object float $x,$y,$z; // new pivot string $cmd; $allObjects = `ls -sl`; for ( $obj in $allObjects )