Archive for the ‘General Interest’ Category

New Plug-in Coming Soon: AM_Ribbon

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Things have been unusually hectic so far this year, and with GDC on the horizon it’s not looking to be much clearer for awhile. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t found a way to make all of my different obligations overlap in some ways! I’ve been working a little bit as a consultant over the last few months to help out Infinite Ammo with an upcoming title: Marian.

During the course of my work on the project, I developed a new Python plug-in for Maya to help out with hair modeling. I will hopefully have a chance to deploy a new version of my free Python package soon that will include it, but in the meantime I thought I might share this video that Alec posted up on the IA website where I show what the plug-in does. Hopefully some other folks out there will find it useful too!

Minor Site Update

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

I just migrated the whole site from http://6ixsetstudios.com to http://adammechtley.com! Sorry if you were trying to access anything during the short transition period. All incoming links should still work fine, but please let me know if you find anything broken anywhere in the site.

Tools Reorganization

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

As Ryan and I have been working on our Maya Python book, I have been converting more of my own tools into Python modules and scripted plug-ins. Consequently, I have decided to stop supporting my old MEL tools and have begun rolling everything into a single Python package: AM Tools.

Additionally, I have put up a couple of custom plug-in commands to accompany nodes that I previously released on the site. Because these make pretty good use of a variety of Maya API classes, they should serve as a pretty good reference for anyone out there wanting to roll their own commands!

Setting up your PYTHONPATH environment variable globally on OSX

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Here’s another time-saver for OSX users. Don’t use environment.plist for global environment variables!
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Maya Python – The Book

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Well we have finally wrapped up development on Touch KO! The last few weeks have been hectic as we had some last-minute requirements sort of indirectly imposed on us by Apple, but everything is wrapped up and sent off to Chillingo.

One of my next projects is a book on the Maya Python API for Morgan Kaufmann (publisher of David Gould’s Complete Maya Programming texts). Ryan Trowbridge and I will be working on this together over the next year, so it is sure to be fun and exciting. We have a pretty comprehensive plan for what the book will cover, but please do feel free to contact either of us if there are specific things you would like to see!

In other news, Crane Wars, the newest Blurst game, was released a couple weeks ago. Among other things, I focused primarily on the characters in it. I did a post awhile ago that showed the facial rigs I created for them. Go play it now!

Crane Wars logo