More Rotate Canvas in Photoshop bugs

Rotate the canvas and paint on the image with a brush using an intuos with tilt. Stranger still, I can't get a screen capture tool to show the brush how it's actually displaying.

So at best I could try to show that I'm drawing with my right hand and its tilted down to the right in a 5 o'clock direction. Adobe implements features and releases them before they're actually usable. Horrible lame bug.

Rotate Canvas in Photoshop

Great, I can rotate the canvas, Only took a decade to add this feature to Photoshop. Now, what's the obvious way to reset the rotation? Anyone?

ron adding to his shogetsu ikebana

at the kobayashi memorial

Photoshop brushes still suck

It's been about oh, two decades and the brushes in photoshop still have lame stepping issues. I drew some turds to demonstrate.

It amazes me that the grumpy old guy that must govern the brush code in photoshop has never learned how to smooth brush paths using some sort of interpolation, or even at least doing what painter does. For years painter has had this solved, and it looks fine.

Sure, painter still steps its brushes, but it's defaults are working so much better and the profile of the stroke is even and not lumpy. Yes, I know I can change the photoshop brushes to look and behave the same, but screw you! I shouldn't have to! The defaults should not look like poops!

Maya never saves all my prefs.

Ever since version 1, Preferences->Settings->Time: always defaults to 24fps for a new scene. Everything else in the preferences are saved and will keep what you've set them to when you start a new scene, but 24fps will come back. This is a rather severely annoying issue.

Stuff like that is why you need to write a script to actually restore your settings how you want them and you can't actually rely on the settings being saved and set to something you want when you start a new scene. I find this incredibly stupid. Not just annoying, but stupid. Stupid because this is something that's been around for over 10 major releases.

common, who do i need to stick a knife into to get this fixed?

New scenes always default to 24fps, even if you "save" preferences at anything else. Stupid...

Setup at work.

Unfortunately, the office has no AC. So it's rather warm in this small little room with several gigantic machines and almost 20 monitors. But the space pilot found a nice home next to my intuos 4. Cintiq coming next? maybe, depends on how much I feel like dropping the 2k on a monitor. For the moment I'm not doing a whole lot of drawing or sculpting so the expense makes less sense, but If i get back into the art side of production again I'll be looking at the Cintiq again. The camera on this Sprint EVO is pretty bad, horrible actually.

But there's my desk at work. you can see a kinect peeking out from the left there. I'm glad to see that there's already a million units pushed out to the public. And today I'm back in Unrealscript. It's almost like a warm blanket, which might sound nicer if it wasn't already 80f in the office.

New Space Pilot!

Okay, I'm a nerd, I like cool toys.

I just got a Space Pilot Pro from 3D Connexion. It's a fun little puck input device that lets you fly around in Maya or Max, what ever. (all but Modo, so you Luxology guys better add 3d connexion into your sauce, I'm waiting!)

The little LCD display is actually not that useful as I'm usually looking at my computer's monitor, not my input devices monitor, but it does at least tell me what buttons are currently doing what.

This is my moderately mobile setup. I'm sitting at a coffee shop working on my Kinect Game's character setup and building a few placeholder assets in Maya. I'm using 2010 since 2011 is broken. Yep, an Alienware m11x2 i7 8GB ram 180GB ocz SSD (from newegg) Razer Mouse, the Space Pilot from 3D Connexion, and a latte at Sea Biscuit in the sunset dist in San Francisco.

These are good things.

Kinect game development is fun, actually, I wish I could do more here at a coffee shop, but I'll have to make do with things that don't directly involved the device. I'd like to see the Kinect Open Source PC driver linked to UDK through a DLL, but that might have to wait for a few more weeks till someone in the community makes it happen. (hopefully it's in progress now)

// Error: Value is out of range: 0 //

Okay, So I really hope someone at Autodesk knows about this and is going to release a fix in the next hour or so. Here's my screen shot: LOOK AT IT!

What's wrong? Well first off this is the "Transfer maps..." dialog. But for some strange reason it's located under the Create -> Camera options menu. NOT under transfer maps. And stranger the create camera options part of the dialog is crumpled up to the top left corner of the dialog, and it's unusable. I have no idea what the heck is going on here.

Selecting the menu item that says transfer maps... gives you an error "// Error: Value is out of range: 0 // " which is pretty bad. You'd imagine that SOMEONE at least tested to see if the menu's would come up when clicked.

I guess Autodesk decided to skip testing a major release. I guess someone figured "Qt" it's great right? I bet we don't even have to make sure it works before releasing it! I want to poke someone in the eye with a fondue fork for this.

Old habits die hard.

I have an old habit of opening a folder on the network, selecting them, going to maya, selecting file->open... then dragging the files from the explorer window to the open dialog window so they go to where im opening them from. It's several clicks shorter for me to do that rather than opening another explorer window browsing to where maya is pointed and then copying files form the network to the maya project directory.

Nope, cant do that any more. stupid Qt.

Unity3D shift select and change attributes

In Unity3D, why can't you select more than one object in the scene, then change all of their properties at the same time. In other words, select about 10 objects, and change their scale all at the same time from 1.0 to 2.0. Seems like something obvious.

Folder Bookmarks...

So there's a part of the file dialog that is called "Folder Bookmarks" but I cant see where i'd add my own folder bookmarks for directories I'd like to have bookmarked. Is this a half implemented feature? Also, why are there like a dozen autosave directories? wouldn't it be a good idea to show at least a part of the path where that autosave directory lives?

Alt+UpArrow vs. Backspace

In the file dialogs for maya 2011 the file windows done recognize Alt+UpArrow for jumping up a level in your directory. it's using backspace, which is fine. But, in all of the other explorer windows you can use Alt+UpArrow, it's just a simple lacking function, but it's something that was removed with the move to Qt. A minor complaint, but it's something im adding to my list of erks.

My cursor is now stuck as a brush...

Why did this happen? I accidentally selected "brush select" for a bunch of things, then canceled the mode, and now my cursor is stuck as a damn brush... I'm not even in a select mode, I'm moving things, the brush select cursor should not be shown. Dumb!

Damnit, I was hoping that this blog wouldn't grow quite so fast.

another example of stupid.

The menu thinks it's that important.

This is how I work in maya, I use the hotbox for everything. Someone once said "its in the menu, not in the hotbox" that confused me, the Hotbox *IS* the menu, and the menu that's always persistent and hanging out taking up screen space is redundant.

It used to be that if i save my prefs in maya 2010, and the menu was hidden, it would stay hidden, hopefully this would make sense. Bug in 2011, if i hide it, save prefs, and reboot maya, the menu comes back for some reason, like it's ignoring my preferences. I wonder what else it's forgetting. Oh like saving a project at 30fps. Then I start a new scene and it resets to 24fps, I guess it's reminding me that Maya is a tool that's used for making "film" movies.

Unity3d

What does "Beautiful" and "Fantastic" Quality mean, no really?

The number of "Blend Weights" should happen per object and weighting should always be created by the tech artist. Globally setting things to 2 bones or 4 bones is a bad idea, simply bad.

While i respect that it's a clever trick to be able to re-weight a mesh's vertex weighting, it's also not good either. (Yes, you're a smart programmer for making such a clever piece of code, good job, have a cookie)

However, going from 4 weights per vert to 2 is not easily predictable nor will automatic re-calculations be accurate. Actually, any procedural weight truncation will look like shit.

So, in a game that has a lot of characters changing the "Quality" setting from "Beautiful" to "Good" will actually look like "Shit" horray!

Unity3D, updating prefabs fail.

having to actually update a "prefab" in each level defeats the purpose of a "prefab"

dumb meta data.

why cant i see more bones at the same time when painting weights??

After all these years, and a complete re-write of the UI, I still cant expand the view port where I select joints. Goddamn Qt why do you make me hate you so much!?

Painting weights is broken in maya 2011

aside from bad normalization options as default. I cant fucking select a damn joint in the view port to paint it!? damnit autodesk you broke my work flow again!

Cant display a skeleton of any skeletal mesh objects in unity

Wouldn't it be great to display the skeleton of an animated skeletal mesh in unity, ya, just like in Unreal. but no, the debug tools in unity are lacking.

unpredictable Joint Translations in Unity3d

Looks like Unity3d does import joint translation for its animation, BUT it's unfortunate that it does so in a completely unpredictable manner.

when importing an fbx

when you import an fbx into 2011 the meshes go into a Mysterious template layer where you cant select the mesh in the viewport and it shows up as a wireframe grey mesh. to get it back so it's both visible with materials and selectable in the view port you need to create a new layer, add the mesh in the outliner to the new layer, then it comes back. after that you can delete the layer.


STUPID new bugs! Booo!