Just like the MayaRender app, but for After Effects. A quick and easy way to launch AE renders without using the resources necessary to load up the After Effects UI and load each preview frame into memory. Plus this gives you the ability to launch multiple renders at once if you so choose.

Essentially just another way to render in the background (inspired by Lloyd Alvarez’s great BG Render script on aescripts.com), but without ever having to open AE. Render speeds should also be slightly quicker this way as well since no resources are used by the app and only the render engine.

AEae_v1.1 download page. . .

Demo:

Here is a quick demo of the AERender & AEae apps (both available in the “labs” section of this site.

QuickTime Version 960×600 (27MB)

iPhone Version

Enjoy! If there are any issues or concerns please contact: andoruLABS.support.

[andoru.LABS]

Just like my MayaMaya app, but for After Effects. It simply opens up another instance of After Effects so you can have multiple projects open at once.

Unfortunately you cannot copy and paste directly from instance to instance, but there are many other reasons this can prove to be very useful.

AEae_v1.1 now supports drag and drop! You can either launch the application normally and choose how many instances you would like to open, or you can drop project files on the app to automatically open them in different instances of After Effects. This version also includes preferences, if you would like to reset the preferences, delete the “com.andorulabs.AEae*” file located in your “/User/Library/Preferences” directory.

Download: AEae download page. . .

Featured on Motionographer.com!

If you have issues, questions, or concerns please contact: andoruLABS.support

[andoru.LABS]

Working with multiple iterations of Maya open is a great way to save time, it allows you to copy and paste individual objects/nodes from scene to scene, just like many pro apps out there. No one has done it better than Apple with Logic Pro 9, making running multiple iterations unnecessary as they have added a fantastic method of importing whatever data you like without importing entire projects (although this is still possible with Logic) :

Selective Track-Import

If you want to have this same type of functionality with Maya on OS X, you can’t just fire open another instance of the app like you can on other platforms by just launching the app again, but luckily it is very easy to do. One method is popping open Terminal and telling Maya what to do:

open -n /Applications/Autodesk/maya2009/Maya.app

This is something you want to do quickly though, so a one click solution is a must, and that is the point of MayaMaya:

Download: MayaMaya download page…

An app to pop in your dock, or Finder toolbar, or wherever is most convenient so you can easily open as many instances as your system can handle.

NOTE: The version available here is for Maya 2009 as it is the version I use, if you would like to use this for 8.5, 2008, 2010 it is a very simple process of opening the app with “Applescript Editor” which you should have in your “Applications” or “Utilities” directories, and changing 2009 to the appropriate version.

One annoyance you can run into is the “Pasted__” prefix that will be added to all pasted files. This can easily be taken care of using a simple .mel script that Alex Villabon does a great job outlining on his site Green Soda.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me or comment, and I will help you sort out any problems.

[andoru.LABS] | [Green Soda]

Looking to get a little bit more friendly with that new Magic Mouse? Look no further.

I have been using BetterTouchTool since I got my hands on the Magic Mouse to be able to middle click in apps like Maya, Nuke, whatever. I actually asked the developer Andreas Hegenberg for very specific middle click functionality (being able to click with one finger in the center of the mouse and to have an adjustment for the exact parts of the mouse that would respond to it) and he came through 100% within 48hrs:

He has recently added many other types of gestures, and a favorite of mine, a single tap right on (or right above) the Apple logo. I have a few tools I have made to make my day to day workflow a little bit more efficient. fn & layout are simple workflow tools that promote laziness to its full extent and the Magic Mouse has managed to make them a little lazier!

960×600 .mov

iPhone

If your mind is blown then comment or email and I will uhh. . . un-blow it for you. Hmm. . .

[BetterTouchTool]

I really don’t enjoy setting renders in Maya, and I definitely don’t enjoy manually setting up command line renders, but it is definitely the way to go when it comes to rendering animation.

The purpose of these little apps is to make that a drag and drop process:

MayaRender – Drag any Maya .ma or .mb onto this droplet to automatically start a command line render in terminal. (Asks to choose Renderer and add any additional Render Flags, universal version will ask which Maya version you would like to use)

Maya SW, MentalRay, and RenderMan, and V-Ray are setup to automatically startup up renders as soon as a file has been dragged onto them, avoiding having to put in any options. (The renderer will automatically use whatever you have setup within your Render Globals in your scene)

Download: MayaRender (6.2MB .zip)
-(Based on code originally developed by Dustin & Cody Beltram.)

Log:
-2009-12-1: added 2010 versions plus V-Ray, and 3delight droplets.
-2010-3-10: fixed Maya 2010 versions to work with the changes that were made to the location of the “render” binary.
-2010-3-20: fixed typos in latest Mental Ray versions (2009 & 2010) and removed “mail_cmd” in MayaRender2010 (universal version), top secret feature coming soon. . .
-2010-4-10: Updated for Maya 2011

Enjoy! If there are any issues or concerns please contact: andoruLABS.support.

[andoru.LABS]

Maya is great, it can handle all of them CG’s that are so popular now a’days. What isn’t so great is that due to it’s fancy pants nature, it can crash at very inopportune times leaving you with your hopes crushed and tears streaming down your face. . .

Luckily, Maya does store recovery .ma files on every operating system that it is available for, on the Mac they are stored in a hidden folder (/private/var/folders/), and in those hidden folders are folders that a normal human doesn’t really understand.

However, it is very easy to set up a search that will indeed search these hidden folders for .MA files, allowing you to easily find your latest recovery data.

I quickly made a saved search (smart folder) that anyone can use to quickly access this default recovery location:


Maya Recover Smart Search
(1kb .zip file)
[Mac OS X 10.5+ if you are using 10.4 you are kidding yourself)

Just unzip the file, and place it in a easy to find directory (I recommend the default Maya directory in your User/Documents/maya folder, so it is always easy to find). I don’t care how cool you are, if you have used a 3D app, it has crashed on you before, and you have shed a tear. If you try this out leave me a comment.

UPDATE: This will-not always work 100%, sometimes it can miss some temp files, because it doesn’t always search the entire nested directories, so if you aren’t seeing it, another method is to go to a Finder window press Cmd+Shift+G, and type /private/var/folders/ and press return. In that “folders” folder is a bunch of arbitrarily named folders, in one of those there should be a -Tmp- folder that will likely have some .ma recent recovery files.

[andoru.labs]