ticket01

If Maya is currently running close all instances of it before running any plug-in installer. You also need Administrator privileges in order to install the plug-in properly.

Start Maya and load the plug-in via the Plug-in Manager. The Plug-in Manager can be found under Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager. Find the plug-in from the list and check both Load and Auto Load. The plug-ins from ticket01 are usually on the end of the list so you may need to scroll all the way down to find them.

When the plug-in is loaded for the first time a dialog will come up asking you to enter your license in order to activate the plug-in. The license data always starts with a line of clear text that states the licensee’s name, the company (optional), the licensee’s email, the product the license is for and a date that tells you when the maintenance is over. After that there are some lines of code.

Clear the activation window and copy all of the license, starting with your name, and paste it into the activation window. Hit Activate and the window disappears. After successful activation of the plug-in a new menu item called ticket01 is added to the main menu bar. You will find your plug-in and all its functionality there.

The Service Preferences menu lets you configure the plug-in whether or not it should perform a check for a new version every time it’s being loaded. A working internet connection is needed for this to work. Furthermore you can decide whether or not you should be informed when the last 30 days of your maintenance have begun.

Smooth wireframe rendering with Contours

Rendering polygons with Contours consists of two steps:

• Preparing the object(s):
• select the objects(s) to be rendered with a contour
• select Prepare object(s) from the ticket01 > Contours > Polygons menu. This will prepare the object(s)* for being rendered with Contour’s mental ray** shader.

• Creating the render setup:
• select the objects(s) to be rendered with a contour
• select Create render setup from the ticket01 > Contours > Polygons menu. This will set up all things necessary to create a contour rendering of your prepared objects.

As you toggle between Smooth Mesh Preview and normal polygon mode the render view will be updated accordingly. Changes to the object’s subdivision level are reflected in the preview and rendering.

*) this will replace the object’s UV layout
**) make sure that the mental ray for Maya plug-in (Mayatomr) is loaded

Rendering NURBS with Contours

Rendering NURBS with Contours is an easy one-step setup: select Create render setup from the ticket01 > Contours > NURBS menu. This will set up all things necessary to create a contour rendering of all selected NURBS objects using mental ray for Maya*.

In order to have more subdivisions in U or V direction, without touching the object, just select it and use the ticket01 > Contours > Override span count menu. This will create two new attributes called Count U and Count V in the shape’s Extra Attributes section that you can access using the Attribute Editor.

The upper image shows a NURBS object with trimmed areas and 5 spans in U and V direction.

The lower image shows the same object but using the span count override with 20 spans in U and V direction.