Mental Ray Shaders and Alpha

I was recently having trouble getting the alpha mask for an object to show up when rendering an object in Maya through Mental Ray and using any of the Mental Ray shaders.

Apparently, that's just how Mental Ray rolls, but there is a very easy little checkbox to fix it.

Go to Render Globals, scroll all the way down to the Custom Entities group and check "Pass Custom Alpha Channel" and all will be good.

What to do if Outlook devours the contents of your exchange server.

With a new job comes a new mail setup. Now that I'm at a place where everyone is using Outlook to do mail and the other things that Outlook does, I had cause to jump on the wagon of bandness. The mail is served through and saved on an exchange server of some kind. I know not the technical details, I just know that you can access things through the web or through any number of local clients. For some reason, each new machine I used had outlook set up in such a way as to delete mail from the server once it was done downloading it. If I were only using one machine, this would have been fine, but I'm not, so it wasn't.

I tried a whole bunch of stuff, but eventually, the winning combination used to make sure that each machine synced up to the exchange server and no messages were deleted was roughly as follows.

• Back up your mail through outlook's import/export utility.


• Export to a file


• choose a .pst file


• choose the top folder and make sure to check the subfolders option


• choose name and location and save the backup file


• Delete your mail account through the Windows Mail control panel


• Delete your Mail Profile through the same control panel (different tab)


• Make a new profile


• Make a new e-mail account


• Choose Cached Mode


• re-import your mail from the exported file

That _should_ be everything.

Vim setup.

Hello.

In this post I intend to write down the various dot files, scripts, plugins and colorschemes I prefer to have on any new installation of Vim.

The first script I usually download is the Colors Sampler Pack. I know it's a purely aesthetic thing, and I only really ever use InkPot or Desert, but it's nice to have all the colors of the rainbow at my fingertips.

For Session Management I prefer sessmgr.

I generally add the following to my _vimrc:

set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set ignorecase
set bs=2
set ai

and I like to have the following in my _gvimrc:

set hlsearch
syntax on
set guifont=Lucida_Console:h7
colorscheme InkPot
win 80 70

I'm sure there is more, but this will serve as a placeholder for now.

Transferring Email between computers and from Outlook to Thunderbird

I thought I would start this tech notes blog to help me keep track of various techy sorts of things. This first post is about transferring email from one laptop to another and from outlook to thunderbird. At first this seemed terribly difficult and I trudged through countless articles on the subject, nearly all of which seemed to indicate that I would eventually have to buy a third party bit of software to be able to read and export Outlook's .pst files.
The final solution was rather simple. Since I couldn't get Thunderbird to read .pst files, and I didn't want to pay for a .pst reader/translator, I thought I would go the route of importing outlook email into another program and figure out howto export it from there. I tried Eudora, but it died a horrible death, supposedly at the 6gb size of the Outlook .pst file I was nursing. After that, I realized my stupidity. Why not just thunderbird on both computers? I had already installed Thunderbird on the first computer in order to have a halfway decent rss reader so it was very easy to import all my mail and contacts. I then took the Mail folder hidden at C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\.default\ and just copied it over the same directory into the second computer's thunderbird directory. I started up thunderbird on the second laptop an it happily loaded all the email I had just plopped in there.

After that, there was a bit of reorganization and remarking everything as read and so on, but all in all, it was fairly painless.