genProxyPlop version1_0

New Script!****

Greek column model is from the freebie section of Turbo Squid.

The genProxyPlop (don't you dare make fun of the name lol ).  It's a script that automates the creation of mip_binarproxy nodes, low poly stand in objects that envelope the high res model and creates the necessary connections for them to work. It just relieves the tedium of working with mip_binaryproxies in Maya.

The script creates a poly cube as the low poly object and if the high resolution model has more than six shaders assigned, the low res object will be split to create more faces to accommodate the shader assignments.  All shaders will be assigned to the low res object in the exact order they're assigned to the high res object (your leaf shader won't appear on your tree trunk!). Of course this option can be disabled.

The write feature auto renders a frame at a temporary low resolution (it'll warn you in case you want to decrease quality settings) and writes out the .mi files to the specified directory. This can also be disabled just in case you want to handle that manually.

Installation:
Copy the mel file to your user scripts folder and the warning icon to your user icons folder (details are in the 'read me' text file if needed) .  Source it in your userSetup mel file for convenience.

Use this code to call the script:

genProxyPlop;







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Creating A User Setup File

Creating a user setup file is pretty easy since it's a regular text file named "userSetup" with the "txt" extension changed to "mel". That's it!  Now you just have to edit this file as you would any text file and add lines of code to be executed as Maya starts up. You can save it in your user scripts folder.

I script in jEdit :3

Like for example, if I downloaded a mel file named doThisStuffForMe.mel and inside that file are multiple procedures and one of them is countMyBeans.  Even if I put doThisStuffForMe.mel in my user scripts folder, I can't just open Maya and call countMyBeans, Maya wouldn't know where to find that and will throw an error saying so. Source the doThisStuffForMe.mel  file first!  Simply open the  userSetup.mel in any plain text editor (like Notepad) and add a source line.

source doThisStuffForMe;

Maya assumes a mel extension

If your userSetup file isn't doing anything and you're on Windows, check here.

Note: You can source manually but you might find that to be inconvenient to do every time you open Maya and want to use your scripts.  There are endless things you can have Maya do on startup, sourcing script files is just one of them!