Installing GENR8

  1. GENR8 is a plug-in for Alias|Wavefront's Maya. So if you do not have Maya installed on your computer, you need to install it before you can use GENR8. Also, it runs on Windows NT, so you may have to change hardware and/or operating system.
  2. Copy the file GENR8.mll to c:\aw\maya3.0\bin\plugins (you may have to change the path if Maya is installed somewhere else on your harddrive, if you are running Maya 4.0, replace the '3' with a '4').
  3. Start Maya.
  4. Go to Window->Settings/Preferences->Plug-in Manager. There you can check both load and auto-load (so that you do not have to do this every time you start Maya) for the GENR8.
  5. Alternatively, you can go to Window->General Editors->Script Editor in the menu. In the white field, type: loadPlugin GENR8.

More Preparations

GENR8.mll contains several MEL-commands and if you are comfortable using MEL, you can use it that way. However, there is also a GUI for some of the commands. If you do not want to be typing MEL-commands all the time, it is a good idea to create shelf-buttons. These buttons should suffice in most cases, but you might want to do some command that these buttons do not handle and then you must resort to the Command Line (or the Script Editor).

  1. Type "genr8 -gui" on the Command Line (the white field in the lower left corner of the Maya-window.
  2. Select the text with the mouse and draw it up to a free space on the shelf (next to the "Particle Tool" if you did not previously edit the shelf).
  3. Start the Shelf Editor, it can be found as the second item on the dropdown menu next to the shelf (the black arrow to the left of the "Curve with CVs")
  4. Scroll down to the white field until you find the "genr8 -gui" and select it.
  5. Change the overlay label to "genr8".
  6. Repeat the above steps for "degenr8" (label "degenr8"), "repellor -g" (label "repellor") and "attractor -g" (label "attractor").
  7. GENR8 uses a coordinate system with the z-axis pointing up, as a default Maya has the y-axis up. To change this, go to the Window->Settings/Preferences->Preferences->Settings and choose y-axis using the radio button.
Back