Have you ever been told to "check your silhouette"? Here's a quick script you can setup in Maya to help you do just that!
Fun with Materials!
So this is kind of a weird little hack to give the illusion of a silhouette. Essentially, we are going to tell Maya to do 2 really simple things:
1) Check the "Use default material" option in the Viewport Shading menu
2) Change the default lambert material to black
When we assign a bit of code to a hotkey in Maya, we can turn this effect on and off, like this:
If you want, you can also scrub the timeline or playblast your animation in silhouette mode, which is kind of cool to see:
Get to the code already!
Okay, enough fancy gifs. The following is the MEL code you need to apply to your hotkey. Hope it helps!
string $panel = `getPanel -wf`;
string $checkLights = `modelEditor -q -dl $panel`;
if ($checkLights != "none"){
modelEditor -e -dl none $panel;
modelEditor -e -udm true $panel;
setAttr "lambert1.color" 0 0 0;}
else {
modelEditor -e -dl "default" $panel;
modelEditor -e -udm false $panel;
setAttr "lambert1.color" 0.5 0.5 0.5;}
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Photo Credit: conskeptical Flickr via Compfight cc