William Schilthuis

Lead Lighting Artist

Tag: Pipeline

  • Blender to Unreal FBX + T3D exporter with instancing

    Blender: these objects share linked mesh data
    Unreal: import one FBX, paste T3D as instances

    I wrote a very simple Blender to Unreal exporter because I couldn’t find one that exported scenes to FBX and T3D at the same time. The purpose is to export only unique data to FBX, instead of all object data, this way duplicates (with linked data in blender) are preserved and objects can be pasted in to Unreal after placement was done in Blender. Now I can export a whole scene at once and still benefit from the efficiency of linked data, without needing to reconstruct object placement manually in Unreal.

    It’s no Datasmith, but this is all I need for testing and it works with Blender.

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  • MentalRay Render Proxy

    This is a simple tool for MentalRay Render Proxies that I added some features to:

    • custom output path
    • inherit shaders
    • maintains set memberships
    • swap between original and proxy

    Any object can be selected and swapped between high and low resolution. This is really useful when getting lost in a mass of bounding boxes that you dont have time to rename and create appropriate proxy cages for. The new object inherits attributes as well as materials and set associations. This way objectSets for pipeline use don’t get broken.

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  • Linear Workflow Tool v2

    Almost exactly a year after publishing my MEL linear workflow tool, the Python version is ready. I am sad that 1 year later there is still a need for this tool (in Maya), but until Autodesk properly handles color management it makes life as a lighter much easier. With new Pre/Post-Render scripts it allows working in Maya in a WYSIWYG manner, hardware/viewports and color swatches provide reasonable previews without hindrance.

    I’ve made this available for download:

    Download wLinearWorkflow here
    (Contains 1 directory (the python module) with readme, license, python code, and icons)

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  • Maya Linear Workflow Tool

    This is a tool that automatically sets up linear workflow for shading networks as described in the blog post here.

    Linear Workflow Shelf Buttons:

    Download wGammaTools v1.0 here

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