Production Tools - Programming (part1)

Programming team made various production tool scripts during this class.
Having Travis as the lead, the team made following scripts...

Comment from Travis:

The programming team has been hard at work creating pipeline tools to create the environment and assist the look/dev team with the creation of the digital sets.
Travis Harkleroad wrote a script that reads in an image file and propagates geometry based on the color channels. It also uses Pixar's RenderMan® to create DelayedReadArchives for the geometry and utilizes Level of Detail (LOD) to expedite the render process.

The programming team also created a simulation of spanish moss blowing in the wind. The simulation utilizes Houdini's L-Systems to dynamically create the spanish moss. The L-system was designed by Joseph J Burnette (http://studentpages.scad.edu/~jburne22/lod/lod.html), a SCAD Savannah student, last year.



To create the look of a long hanging clump of spanish moss, the L-system was instanced onto a dynamic wire object using the copy-SOP. To make the moss appear less dense at the bottom, the complexity of the L-system was connected to the point number of the wire object it was being copied onto. Using some simple wind forces and a wireConstraint, the moss was animated for the opening beauty shot.



The spanish moss is then exported to a RenderMan RIB archive sequence as curves and then read back into Maya using a DelayedReadArchive.

Comment from Garrett:

I wrote a Dailies Submitter script. The dailies submitter is a tool written in python that utilizes the freeware ffmpeg to compress image sequences. It takes in user input for the source files sequence and outputs a .mov file in a predetermined location based on date.

The dailies submitter also generates a log text file and a notes text file based on user captured input.

Comment from Yuriya:

I wrote a Shot-Tree scripts (part of the script is by Kenny Ong) in Bash, which allow the user to create a set of directories (folders) essential for the project based on the shot-tree plan (shown below), and set shortcut to directories they are working.

By running these scripts, users can:

• easily have the set of directories they need.
  
• prevent any mistake in naming convention.
• set shortcut to the show they are working.
  
• set shortcut to the shots they are working. (there are shortcuts to other directories as well)
  

Rules:

• The script must be run in Linux
• As this script is constructed with 6 scripts, users have to follow a certain order to run them. 1) source .myaliases 2) makeshow.sh (skip if show already exists) 3) setpath.sh 4) setshow.sh 5) makeshot.sh (if needed) 6) setshot.sh
• For more detail, please follow the instruction documentation!

Shot-tree plan