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Retroblaster
Nov. 10th, 2007 01:25 pmOne of the cool things about Maya is that you can totally customize just about everything. If you have some tool you use a lot and it's buried in 4 sub-menus, you just open the script editor, do the click-through to your tool, then cut and paste to the shelf and viola! You have a button that you can click that will do it in one click or you can set it up for a keystroke too if you're bored.
Now of course, when they're put on the shelf, the mouseover tag is unuseful. It's the first line of the script and the icon is just an ugly thing that says 'MEL'. You can change the icon but it turns out that it's a royal pain in the ass. On Windows, you can use a bitmap. On the mac, you're limited to Amiga's IFF format or something called XPM (which I've never heard of)
None of my standard tools have this. There's apparently a plu-in for GIMP but I don't have GIMP and I tried a couple of plug-ins for photoshop but neither worked. However, a good search hit lead me to a program called GraphicConverter made by some awesome and crazy german guy. Curiously, the default prefs are set up to only export like 4 or 5 file types but you can go into the preferences and enable export of ALL file types...
So... This thing makes both IFF and XPM but wait... It also does like _90_ other file types! (Both import and export) We're talking old Apple Icon files, Atari PGC files, proprietary mobile-phone image types, LOGO bitmaps, MacPaint, Softimage, SWGs, SGI images, Sun Rasterfiles, even TRS-FRICKIN-80 graphics! Holy crap!
The ability to open and create new data for just about every image format I've EVER been stuck wishing I had the time to hack and decode. I <3 the internet!
Now of course, when they're put on the shelf, the mouseover tag is unuseful. It's the first line of the script and the icon is just an ugly thing that says 'MEL'. You can change the icon but it turns out that it's a royal pain in the ass. On Windows, you can use a bitmap. On the mac, you're limited to Amiga's IFF format or something called XPM (which I've never heard of)
None of my standard tools have this. There's apparently a plu-in for GIMP but I don't have GIMP and I tried a couple of plug-ins for photoshop but neither worked. However, a good search hit lead me to a program called GraphicConverter made by some awesome and crazy german guy. Curiously, the default prefs are set up to only export like 4 or 5 file types but you can go into the preferences and enable export of ALL file types...
So... This thing makes both IFF and XPM but wait... It also does like _90_ other file types! (Both import and export) We're talking old Apple Icon files, Atari PGC files, proprietary mobile-phone image types, LOGO bitmaps, MacPaint, Softimage, SWGs, SGI images, Sun Rasterfiles, even TRS-FRICKIN-80 graphics! Holy crap!
The ability to open and create new data for just about every image format I've EVER been stuck wishing I had the time to hack and decode. I <3 the internet!
