Brian Escribano

I accepted a new job working with Nickelodeon as a Character Rigger starting at the end of April. I will be working with an talented team of artist (few of them I taught myself) and exciting television projects for the network.

On April 10, I took my last steps out of the Computer Animation building at Full Sail where I been teaching Character Rigging and Scripting for the past 5 1/2 years. I had the pleasure with working with many passionate instructors dedicated to sharing knowledge and experience to their eager students. With that in mind "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish".

Did not realize how much work it takes to move across the country, packing an entire house and dragging it in a small trailer. Will be making the long haul this Friday and looking to arrive in Burbank on the 21st. Returned emails will be hit or miss during that time... will be tired and a little bit cranky from the move.

Renames a sequence of nodes using a defined prefix, increment variable(INC), and suffix.
The INC can consists or numbers, lowercase letters or uppercase letters.

Benefits:
Nodes will be named correctly if the name already exist later in the selection.
For example given the nodes ['spam3','spam1', 'spam4', 'spam2'] parented under the world
to be named spam[1-4] will be named correctly without additional increments. Normally
the nodes will be named ['spam5', 'spam6', 'spam3', 'spam4']

Selection: nurbsSphere1, nurbsSphere2, nurbsSphere3, nurbsSphere4, nurbsSphere5
Python: cmds.renameSequence(prefix='mel_', alpha=True, suffix='_junky')
MEL: renameSequence -prefix "mel_" -alpha true -suffix "_junky";
Will rename the nodes to:
mel_a_junky, mel_b_junky, mel_c_junky, mel_d_junky, mel_e_junky, mel_f_junky

I finished another plug-in for Maya back in November that will displace a polygon's vertices in real time.  The plug-in moves the vertices in their normal direction based off a grey-scale 2D texture.

The node is based off  a  deformer which will allow a change in the set membership. During each frame, the active vertices in the set membership will have their UV coordinates queried based off a given UV Map. Then, using the color input of the displace Mesh Node, a color is retrieved that will be used to displace the vertices in their normal direction.

Currently the node only works with 2D textures, which does include image sequences. In the example video all the polygon meshes has a high density for a more accurate representation of the 2D texture. the example in the bottom right corner is 150 by 150 vertices.

Few of the presets were referencing a texture map causing an error when trying to use them. They have been fix and a new version is available. Also, I renamed the folders to "mia_material" and "mia_material_x".

Keep the comments coming.

Read the current discussion here!

Worked on a freelance project with DXD for the Tampa Bay Lightning's jumbotron. I did the character rig for all the characters. Technically, I did one rig and it was duplicated four more times for this shot. Finished the entire rig in a day and a half with very little sleep. The piece lasted about 15-20 seconds and was shown before the game started. Was a very exciting project to work on considering the Lightning is my favorite hockey team.

Turns out that my services were needed for unloading the truck. With the help of a moving crew hopped up on energy drink we was finished in 2 hours.

SIGGRAPH went well, I talked to many people and companies. Many a great ideas for future rigging ideas spawned from the many great talks, that I will be working on soon.

One of the most interesting things I saw was not on the convention floor, but was on the way the Seattle. A truck loaded with tomatoes caught fire. My attempts to snap a picture failed of the flame roasted tomatoes.

The new 2008 demo reel is now live. All the menus and features was created using Python.

Download the 2008 Demo Reel MOV(32M: 720x480 low quality) here!

Download the 2008 Demo Reel MP4(70M: 720x480 high quality) here!

If you have time don't forget to check out my latest creation. A plugin-in that displaces a polygon's vertices in real time. Flash video can be found here!

I will be attending SIGGRAPH this year representing the Orlando ACM SIGGRAPH this year in sunny LA. I am looking for work as a Character Technical Director. Contact me if you want to setup an interview or even just to hang out.

I will be staying with my brother in LA before I help him move to Seattle, so I will be touring the city on the 20th. Going to be a nice 18 hour drive, hopefully he does not ask me to help him unpack the truck.

-Brian

I wrote this class, while rigging two character simultaneously for my new reel. The rigs are very similar and the names of the nodes are the same. Felt that I was spending too much time renaming the nodes on the second character by referencing the first character's names. Tried copy/paste which did work but wasn't time saving. This class allow a selection of node names to be stored in a file and loaded in another instance of Maya with a search and replace feature.

#Character 1 old = crossRename() old.storeSelect() old.setPath('usd') old.write('tempSelect')

#Character 2 new = crossRename() new.storeSelect() new.setPath('usd') new.load('tempSelect') new.rename()

Any feature request please let me know. If you like the script please email me, sign the guestbook or leave comment

Download the crossRename here!

Was challenged two weeks to write a script that selects all odd or even CVs of a nurbs curve. Kind of a speed challenge, but was distracted during the writing of the script so what should of taken less then 10 minutes to write turned into 20 minutes.

#Created by Brian Escribano, www.meljunky.com import maya.cmds as cmds def curveOffset( ): selection = cmds.ls(selection=True) curve = selection[0].split('.')[0] selCV = selection[0][ selection[0].find('[')+1 : selection[0].find(']') ] numSpans = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.spans' ) degree = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.degree' ) form = cmds.getAttr( curve + '.form') numCVs = numSpans + degree; if ( form == 2 ): numCVs -= degree try: state = int(selCV) % 2 except: state = 0 selCV = numCVs + 1 if state == 0: selList = range(0, numCVs-1, 2) # evens else: selList = range(1, numCVs, 2) # odds for sel in selList: if sel != int(selCV): cmds.select( curve + '.cv[' + str(sel) + ']', toggle=True)

parentCurve function allows for quick parenting of nurbs curve's shape node to a given list or selection.

Keyword Arguments:
normal=(1,0,0) #Sets the normal direction of the makeNurbsCurve, default to X
radius=0.5 #Adjust the radius of the curve
color=None #Change the color of the curve, choices are [1-31]
selList=None #The list of nodes to make the adjustments. Default will be the current selection

This short function will create a group node above the nodes in a given list. If no list is provided then the selection is used. Has the ability for search and replace. The group node will be placed in the same position, to zero out the controls of translation and rotation. Will also adjust the parenting as needed.

For example: groupAbove('CTRL', 'GRP') will create a group node with the named change by the search and replace keyword.

One limitation of MEL over Python is the inability to setup default keyword arguments in functions (procedures). For MEL to create reusability for a procedure to work with a selection or a custom array will take multiple commands or procedure.

Removed the extra white spaces from the file names for the MIA presets for Maya and added a new download for Advance Output.  A round of applause to Dagon for the great suggestions and ummm... corrections.

Keep the comments coming. 

Read the current discussion here!

Working with the help of David Hackett, I converted all the MIA Presets for 3D MAX that was created by Jeff Patton to individual presets for Maya using Python. The presets that required procedural or texture files were changed to the value of black.

If you have any questions about the presets and Mental Ray I will gladly forward your inquiries to David. After all... I am a Technical Artist, not a Render Monkey!

Update (December 6, 2008): Create a folder called "attrPresets" in your presets folder and drop the folder from the zip inside. Wasn't very clear on how to get them to work.

Download MIA Presets Here: mia_presets.zip

Download Advance Output MIA Presets Here: mia_ao_presets.zip

multiConnectAttr allows for multiple attribute connections at one time with the option for a custom
undo/doIt commands in ethier Python or MEL based off a list/array. Useful for updating a GUI that does not normally allows for undos.

Download for Python 2.4.3 ( Maya 8.5) Here!
Download for Python 2.5.1 ( Maya 2008) Here!

Please email me or use the Contact Form if you like the multiConnectAttr Command. You can also leave a comment at this very entry or even sign the Guestbook.