Weblog of Gopalakrishna Palem

Temple scene with Maya Fluids, Particle Dynamics and Realflow Meshes

P.Gopalakrishna — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:56:17 GMT

Here is a brief demonstration of Maya fluids, particle dynamics and Nurbs combined together to create an early morning Temple scene effect. The light source is being animated with soft body particle dynamics, while the smoke emitting from sticks is typical...(read more)

Animating a Tree Growth

P.Gopalakrishna — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:50:47 GMT

Here is a brief demonstration of tree growth animation in Vue. Animating the Diameter, Gnarl, Falloff, length and other related parameters gives the required result. Also note the growing grass at the base of the tree and the animated clouds. For more,...(read more)

Fixing JDKMidi to auto sort MIDI Events

P.Gopalakrishna — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 09:27:00 GMT

After reviewing many existing C/C++ MIDI libraries, it appears JDKMidi seems to be the one having the features required by many midddlware libraries. However, JDKMIDI library (as of Revision 560) suffers a huge drawback of not being able to auto sort...(read more)

Maya 2010 to include Compositing and Camera Tracking Tools

P.Gopalakrishna — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:38:00 GMT

Autodesk, as usual, announced its next version of Maya at Siggraph. The interesting part, however, is the range of tools planned to be shipped as part of it: Maya Composite high dynamic range compositing system Matchmoving camera tracking system Additional...(read more)

How to make QT SDK work with VisualStudio 2008 (Express/Complete)

P.Gopalakrishna — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:32:00 GMT

You can use the following steps to make QT SDK work with your Visual Studio 2008 (either express version or commercial version). Download the QT SDK from http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/sdk-windows-cpp If you do not have VisualStudio 2008 get it from...(read more)

How to make my water surface animate in Vue?

P.Gopalakrishna — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:13:00 GMT

When a Water object is added to the Vue scene, it will be in a staic form without any animation applied to its surface. If you would like to have the water surface animated, then we have to enable its Displaced Water Surface property. This property allows...(read more)

Listing the codecs intalled on the machine

P.Gopalakrishna — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:10:00 GMT

Often an application requires to list all the Audio/Video compressors installed on the machine. We can achieve this easily with the ICreateDevEnum interface available from DirectShow. ICreateDevEnum exposes a method named CreateClassEnumerator that allows...(read more)

Displaying the currently selected components with MSelectionList

P.Gopalakrishna — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:10:00 GMT

The MGlobal::getActiveSelectionList() offers a convenient way of accessing the currently selected objects in the view. However, if you wish to find the selected components then you need to use the MSelectionList's getDagPath() method. It returns the dagPath...(read more)

How to find the Shading Groups for a Shape node in Maya API?

P.Gopalakrishna — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:55:00 GMT

Given the DagPath for any Mesh object, listing the Shading Groups connected to it is easy. The MFnMesh::getConnectedSetsAndMembers() will do the trick as shown below: MStatus ListShadingGroups(const MDagPath& inputShapeDagPath) { if(inputShapeDagPath.hasFn(MFn::kMesh))...(read more)

Tracking C++ variable state changes

P.Gopalakrishna — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:56:00 GMT

Tracking class variables' state changes can be tricky, especially if we are using too many asynchronous constructs. This is especially true for game and graphic application scenarios where hundreds and perhaps even thousands of object fly around changing...(read more)

Having trouble with PoserFusion Shelf in Maya?

P.Gopalakrishna — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:51:00 GMT

If you are encountering errors with Poser Fusion shelf buttons in Maya such as "Error: No Selection, or the Currently Selected object is not linked to a Poser file", then try the below steps and see if its helps. First of all ensure that your POSER_LOCATION...(read more)

How to create and manipulate Terabyte size Arrays with Win32API

P.Gopalakrishna — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:01:00 GMT

If you are looking for a way of creating and accessing very large arrays, arrays that can handle content in the order of Tera Bytes, then probably you might find the File Mapping techniques useful for that purpose. File mapping is the association of a...(read more)

Multiplication Circuit for Prime Factorization

P.Gopalakrishna — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:32:00 GMT

Deriving a multiplication circuit for the Prime Factorization problem is trivial if you know how to convert the arithmetic and relational expressions into propositional logic. Below I will show few expressions and their corresponding CNF formulation....(read more)

How to check if my code is executing inside a Managed App or Native App?

P.Gopalakrishna — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:56:00 GMT

If you check the CRT source code (inside VC\crt\src\crt0.c ) you can find an interesting function check_managed_app() that returns 1 if managed app, 0 if not based on the COM Runtime Descriptor in the Image Data Directory of the PE or PE+ header. You...(read more)

Well-designed libraries

P.Gopalakrishna — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:46:00 GMT

It is very rare that we come across a well-designed library every day, and even rare that we get a chance to work on them on daily basis. While it is hard to define what makes any given library "well-designed", it is rather easy to identify what is not....(read more)