Flair Maya Shelf

Flair shelf
The Flair shelf with its three segments: Art-direction, Lighting/Inspection and Rendering.

The Flair shelf contains all tools required to work with Flair, separated into three segments:

  1. Art-direction
  2. Lighting/Inspection
  3. Rendering

While most users will find themselves working with the first segment, it’s important to understand what the remaining two segments are for.

Don’t like working with shelves? The last shelf tool will popup the shelf into its own window.

Art-direction

The art-direction tools can be found in the left side of the shelf, ordered from highest to lowest level of control.

  1. FLAIR - opens the browser with the Flair documentation.
    Double click shows the “What’s New” splash window.
  2. STYLE - opens the Style Presets to load/save styles and their parameters [docs].
  3. GLOB - selects the global node to change style attributes [docs].
  4. PRES - opens the Material Presets to load/save predefined Flair materials and their parameters [docs].
  5. MAT - selects the materials of currently selected objects or components.
    Double click shows the material tab within the Attribute Editor, without changing the current selection. If the material was already shown, it will refresh the UI fixing any potential issues.
    Right click -> Only show material in AE will have the same functionality as double clicking on the mat shelf icon.
    Right click -> Select objects assigned to selected material will select all objects that share the selected material.
  6. BULK - opens the Bulk Attribute tool. An attribute editor that lets you modify multiple Flair materials at once (in bulk) [docs].
  7. NFX - opens the NoiseFX tool that lets you control effects procedurally on Flair materials [docs].
  8. VFX - opens the VertexFX window that lets you paint each effect directly onto your 3D models [docs].

Lighting/Inspection

The lighting and inspecting tools allow to easily create the supported lights within Flair and to troubleshoot if things are not looking quite right.

  1. Supported lights - shelf icons for the four different supported lights: ambient, directional, point (no shadow maps) and spot light.
  2. PASS - opens the Inspector, which lets you toggle on/off each style pass and troubleshoot the inner workings of the style itself.
  3. TEST - creates our favourite sphere with default lighting.

Rendering

  1. TBOX - opens the Flair Toolbox, containing useful functions to work with Flair in production [docs].
  2. FLOAT - opens a floating viewport with a 1280 x 720 resolution.
    Right click -> Float viewport 1024 x 540 opens a floating viewport with a 1024 x 540 resolution.
    Right click -> Float viewport 1080 x 1080 opens a floating viewport with a 1080 x 1080 square resolution.
    Right click -> Float viewport 1920 x 1080 opens a floating viewport with a 1920 x 1080 resolution (Full HD).
    Right click -> Float viewport 2048 x 1152 opens a floating viewport with a 2048 x 1152 resolution (2K).
    Right click -> Custom float viewport opens a floating viewport with a custom resolution set through a small dialog.
  3. RENDR - opens the Viewport Renderer, which quickly allows to save screenshots or playblasts [docs].
  4. SEQ - opens the Flair Renderer, which allows to render sequences and all different AOVs for production [docs].
  5. IM/EX - opens the Import/Export tool to import or export .style files [docs]
    Right click -> Custom auto-import function found in: flair_import_export.auto_import_style().
    Right click -> Custom import function found in: flair_import_export.custom_import().
    Custom import functions can be overriden depending on the project’s pipeline.
  6. SUPP. - opens the browser straight to support at the Artineering page.

Opens a popup shelf so that you can always access the Flair tools while using other shelves.

Flair popup shelf
The popup shelf with all Flair tools.