I was having a play with the very versatile Utility shader assigned to a head mesh and accidentally came up with something that looks like a pencil sketch style. I scaled the head down in Z so that it’s almost flat. The Utility shader’s ‘Overlay Mode’ is set to Wire so that the wireframe of the mesh is visible and lowered the Opacity to 0.1 (remembering to disable ‘Opaque’ and ‘Cast Shadows’ on the mesh).

Below are in camera renders from Arnold (no post processing involved).

Delighted to see my artwork used on the latest album by Kateboy.

A 3D scan was taken of the lead singer Kate Akhurst which I used to project the curves onto in Maya. Kateboy then art directed how they wanted the curves to look in relation to the original head scan. I then rendered the image using Arnold for Maya by Solid Angle. A more technical breakdown of the process can be found in this tutorial.

The album can be ordered here:

iTunes: http://po.st/KBODLFB
CD and 12″ Vinyl: http://po.st/KBOPFB

While I appreciate the functionality of the new Hotkey Editor in Maya 2016, I feel it could be improved. My main bugbears with it are:

• It takes far too long to open, much like the new Hypershade window.
• Its far too large and cannot even fit on my screen at lower resolutions.

• It cannot be resized.
• Changing the ‘Search By’ menu loses your hotkey so you have to add it again.
• No option to change a hotkey when creating a new Runtime Command (have to search for it afterwards).
• Can’t save settings for the window itself, so I have to keep changing the ‘Search by’ to Hotkeys every and ‘Keyboard’ to ‘Runtime Commands’ every time I use it.
• Im also getting lots of issues with having to press keys twice to get them to work (a conflict somewhere), but that’s another issue.
• It has a super ugly pop up window after saving a Runtime Command that has to be clicked on, which is almost as annoying as this window that I seem to see every time I open a scene and that interrupts everything.

Anyway I mocked up a couple of ways to improve the look and feel of the window. Rant over 🙂