The site creators of CGCircuit.com are ready to let more people in and buy my videos! The videos are finally ready to be sold. However, you still need an invite to register on the site and buy the videos. I have a new set of invites to give away so use my contact form to send me your email if you want in and I’ll send you an invite. The Maya API class is still discounted at $80 until a month after the full public release.

Also those that I invite will have invites of their own to give away.

My Maya API videos will soon be released. I’ve gotten word that they will be open to the public very shortly. The Maya API series is about 6 hours worth of video covering several topics from creating commands, contexts, locators, deformers, file translators, and dependency graph nodes to working with callbacks, multi-threading, attribute editor templates, and distributing your plug-ins.

I’ve also created an Applied 3d Math video series. This series is a little over an hour and covers how to actually use 3d math with practical examples. This isn’t your typical how-to-multiply-matrices math tutorial. I don’t even go over how to multiply matrices! The focus of this series is how you can apply 3d math in your day-to-day work.

Stay tuned for the actual release. It should just be a matter of days.

Here is another sample from my upcoming Maya API video series. In the video I discuss custom locators and go through how to implement them. The video series should be available around January 2012.

This is a demo of a Maya context that I developed as part of my upcoming Maya API instructional video series. It draws curves from a mesh. It could be used to draw hair curves or something along those lines. The video series should be available around January 2012.

For some reason, the Maya artisan tool does not have a move brush so I wrote my own.

I put up a free shape inversion tool available here. cvShapeInverter is a script and deformer that can invert a shape through a deformation chain so the shape can be applied as a front of chain shape. This has the same functionality as Christian Breitling’s correctiveShape plug-in. He stopped providing it after Maya 2008 so I’m providing a Python version that doesn’t need to be compiled.

I made this guy who has some anger issues.

A few former coworkers of mine worked together to put together this little animation using a couple of rigs I made.  Check it out:

• Animation – George Aleco-Sima
• LookDev/Rendering – Brad Falk
• Textures -  Terry Molatore
• Rigs and Creature Model – Chad Vernon
• Matte Paint – Alfonso Villar
• Sound Effects – Kyle Gray
• Technical Wizard -  Geordie Martinez

I’m happy to announce that last month, I accepted an offer to work at Digital Domain‘s new San Francisco office as a Rigging Pipeline TD. This was my first week of work and it looks like it is going to be an amazing opportunity. The small talented team is lead by Academy Award winning VFX Supe, Stephen Rosenbaum.  With solid leadership and a talented team, we should be churning out some great work in the future.  Stay tuned!

This is an update of my sticky lips deformer. In an attempt to make the deformer more automated, I’ve implemented a mode where the vertices stick on contact and then fade off with time. The original mode is based solely on distance and so would stick together even if the mouth was on its way to being closed. The frame stuttering is from the Camtasia settings. The deformer runs in real-time.