Working along with the Head of 3D Geometry at Spree3D, I developed a series of tools for the Animation, Modeling and Cloth Simulation departments. These tools use a proprietary Maya plugin to tailor the specific requirements for the company’s pipeline and the authoring of digital assets used by the company’s application.
Tools Collection
In-house tools available in a custom Maya Shelf deployed with our proprietary Maya plug-in. Established the Icons and Tool UI design.
The collection provide a wide range of tools for mesh retopology, custom deformers, batching operations, editing alembic caches, transfer UVs and facesets, combine objects, concatenation of cameras and alembic caches, weight maps application, review and testing utilities.
UI Classes
I was responsible for the design and implementation of the Tools UI and scripts. By using Object Oriented Programming we were able to create an array of UI classes from a main UI class containing all common methods, widgets and layouts. This allowed us to update common methods across our entire tool set, such as adding right-click menu options for certain custom button widgets, versioning options, updating logging and batching UI sections. Additionally the main UI class contains methods for rapid widget UI creation to simplify and reduce redundancy in the sub classes code, another benefit was the ability to develop new sections that were common for a group of UIs, such as run headless processes of Maya or adding logging/ publishing capabilities to our tools.
Deformers and Batching
Some of the tools were developed to work with our proprietary deformers in order to edit and propagate changes to our static models and simulation caches, these tools allow the artist to edit and/or fix cloth animations without having to re-simulate. Additionally these deformation tools are critical to edit the animation caches while testing them directly with our proprietary technology.
Two UIs support each of our deformers, one for applying and editing the deformer on a particular object, and another one to batch the deformer across all the other sizes of the object.
In order to efficiently batch these deformers, I developed a wrapper to launch Maya heedlessly through the command line to process any of our batching scripts. This allows us to run multiple headless instances of maya which run over 10 times faster than in a standard Maya session.
Taking the batching process even further, I develop a multiple deformer batch tool in order to apply deformers sequentially. This an other automation efforts have speed up our workflow with minimal involvement from the artist other than to edit, test and review.