When I was in the university in South Africa, one day, my car was broken in by two guys along the road near the university.

Security guy came to me and told me that they have caught the guys trying to steal the car red handed while they were going on about it inside my car. For that I had to go to the court one day to testify few things. So I went.

Upon arrival, I found myself inside a small court room with judge and the two guys who were supposed to be the accused of attempt to steal my car. My testimony was simple and it only took 5 mins.

After about 30mins into the proceeding a large table was brought inside the room and on top of it were many items like laptop computers and clothes books etc. They were stuffs stolen from the other victims around the university. From there on, they were asked one by one whether the item on the table did belong to them or not.

You can obviously guess that the things became a bit of comedy when the items like pents , glasses were asked and put them on to prove that the items were indeed theirs.

It was only almost at the end , when a small thin green book was held high and asked if it was theirs. They replied without hesitation “Yes”. But alas, it was an ID book…..!

An ID Book…. of someone else.

The court had 15 mins break after that and we all went outside to have a giggle. I just can’t forget that day. It was so funny.

Update of Cas auto UV mapper to 1.01 released!

Undo options are now saved and restored upon closing. (Thanks Destro for makeing me keep looking for the solution)

Windows UI does not relaunch itself when it already exists

Enjoy!

Update:

version 1.0 has finally been released! Nothing much as been changed since released candidate D so , if you don’t want to bother, then you don’t need this version.

check out the autouvmapper page for full description!

http://www.castorlee.com/maya-tools/auto-uv-mapper

Update : thanks for all the help guys, this tool is now at release candidate D and if there are no more major bugs, I will release version 1.0 officially at the end of this week.

—

At last, version 1.0 is upon us and I have been working for few days to get this sorted out.

If you like, here is chance to try version 1.0_beta testing version before they get released to the other portal sites.

As I have said before, from version 1.0 all you have to do is run the installer to get everything setup.

then in Maya just run mel command :

Cas_APU;

before you install this version please delete all files related to the old version.

If you find any bug or suggestions, please let me know.

You will still need to install python win32com extension if you want to use save photoshop path function, but if you have done it already, then you are ok.

Cas_autoUnfold-1.0-Setup_beta.zip

I am going to make a video tutorial for all new functions I have introduced in this version soon. But feel free to experiment with the new tools and let me know what you guys think. Also contact me if you find them difficult to understand how to use them.

Version 0.43 now supports most of other known Maya 2008 and 2009 versions.

Maya 2008, Maya 2008 extension 1 , Maya 2008 2008 extension 2 , and all corresponding x64 versions

Maya 2009, Maya 2009 service pack 1 , Maya 2009 service pack 1a , and all corresponding x64 versions

- Minor update with few issues about Roadkill.exe location.
- Minor UI issue fixed (too short on some other language windows)
- Fixed issue with ABF and LSCM function distorts uvs for very small objects or scene with millimeter unit settings.
- Fixed Major bug with ABF and LSCM not working with non default uvset.
- Better Maya version check and support : Maya 2009 service pack 1 , Maya 2009 service pack 1a , and Maya 2008 extension 1 and all their corresponding 64bit versions.

Coming soon:

version 1.00

Belt mapping (this is cool)
Match UV along U or V direction
Photoshop Path export support for 64bit version of Maya
UI update
Installer ?

I welcome any suggestions or feature requests!

I think Google is trying to get me killed.. or is it being really smart? Anyway, check out what Google map shows me when I want to find direction to my next fishing spot.

haha… walk and swim into sea…

well you know it must be a joke right? !

It is well known that Maya’s insert edge loop tool does not work properly when camera is visiable in the display view port. I thought I would add my work around to the problem.

My work around involves placing all the cameras in the scene into a display layer and turn its visibility off. I normally run this script in the beginning to avoid the insert edge loop tool bug. This bug is very annoying if you don’t know why it causes and can spend many hours trying to figure out how to work around it. Controlling the visibility of camers through use of layer is neat because I have full control of the scene and not touching unnecessary attributes of the actual cameras.

{
string $oldSel[] = `ls -sl`;
string $cameraNames[] = `ls -type “camera”`;
string $cameraTransform[] = `listRelatives -p $cameraNames`;
print “cameras to move to new layer : \n”;
print $cameraTransform;

select $cameraTransform;

string $layerName = `createDisplayLayer -name “cameraLayer” -number 1 -nr`;
string $attribute = $layerName+”.visibility”;
setAttr $attribute 0;
if (size($oldSel) != 0)
 {
 select $oldSel;
 }
}

Come on Audodesk. FIX THIS BUG!

I thought that I should give a go with Python programming that does not involve Maya for once and I just followed Buzz VTM’s Introduction to Python : Pong and got this done in about 3 hours.

my first Pong!

It was fun… and very easy to do. I am using Python 3.1 so if you want to run this (haha) then you will need to install following :

Python 3.1 (just get the latest one)

Pygame extension (also for Python 3.1)

 pyPong.zip

! important !

update on pong game now with sound effect! But there was a bug with pygame lib that was not working with python 3.1 But I have run the game under python 2.4 and it worked fine. So please do not run under python 3.1

Fished at Day house for about 5 hours. Did not catch anything until the last moment just off the margin like 20 cm away from the land! I could probably grab them with my hand. They seem to come near the shore when light goes darker. Interesting. Landed 2 carps of decent size. Some nice dusk pic on the way back. The day is becoming too short too soon already.

Mech and fantasy creatures, what else can you ask more!

The first teaser trailer for James Cameron’s ever-so slightly hyped sci-fi thriller Avatar is finally online.

It’s beautiful and strange and lush, but while the landscape and spaceshippy imagery looks wondrous, the character models do seem a tiny bit… videogame cut-sceneish.