It is time for a new update of my MARI Tool Kit. I refined the UI and gave it a couple of nice icons. Besides that I have rewritten the image import which is now faster and now able to sort all the imported files into mask groups. So each UDIM has then its own mask group and its textures. If the user defines an entity as well all UDIM groups are nested under their entity. This makes working with all textures in modo very easy.
Besides that the user has various tools for integrating manually imported textures like set the UV offset or shader effect, gamma correction and create UDIM selection sets.
Currently it is supported for MODO 701 and 801. It doesn't utilise the UDIM features of the new MODO version but I am working on it and there will soon be an update to v1.6.1
So if you are a modonaut and have MARI in the pipeline you might want to give it a try. Download it from my github.
After a lot of work the last couple of weeks I finally pushed out a new release of my KIT for MODO. All the time I spent for it was a new tool for matching a camera to a still image and so the name is quite obviously CameraMatch.
I had the idea for quite a while now but I wasn't really sure if I had the programming skills to do this. But after I had a look at an article from fxguide (actually two) I was sure I could do it.
At first it seemed pretty easy and it was going well. At least I thought it would. But after the solving of the two vanishing points it was pretty difficult for me. The math I did for the orientation of the camera didn't work or would only work for some images. Especially the yaw rotation made me headaches. Then I found BLAM a plugin for blender and it was based on Using Vanishing Points for Camera Calibration and Coarse 3D Reconstruction from a Single Image. And this was just what I have been looking for. I then spent about one week to get my vector math skills back on track which have been collecting dust since school. Would I had known that I really could use these I would have paid more attention back then.
Thanks to the modo community I could takle down some major bugs and here is the next version of BJs ToolBox.
Besides CameraMatch, BJ's ToolBox has several other features: Modelling: Tools:
Rotate Element: hover over an element and rotate it through its local axis
Thread Tools: Inspired by the modelling techniques of Peter Stammbach.
create inner or outer thread
define diameter, sides and the number of steps
the thread itself is currently hard coded and best use in the range of millimetres and centimetres
Animation:
Cameras To Animation: create an animation from a bunch of cameras
Shader Tree:
Create Materials in Shader Tree: creates material groups for material tags
