In a large, city-based MMO world such as World of Darkness, artists must create dozens if not hundreds of individual buildings to populate multiple cities.
Solution: A tool to help artists easily create modular buildings by laying out a building footprint and populating it with premade building pieces.
Usage:
-Artists create building "kits," which are collections of building pieces that share a common theme or architectural style.
-Artist lays out a building footprint as a CV curve, in any desired shape. He then uses the tool to populate the curve using the selected building kit.
-Individual pieces can be switched out at will, such as wall segments for windows, doors, or decorations such as columns.
Modular Building Creation Tool
Example city populated largely with modular buildings
A fantasy/horror MMO such as World of Darkness requires the creation of many monsters and humanoids requiring unique skeletons set up for the same engine
Solution: A tool that allows the easy creation of skeletons, either based on predefined joint heirarchies or from scratch.
The user can easily switch between template and skeleton mode. Template mode allows quick modification of the joint layouts, mirroring, and other options.
Skeleton Creator Tool
Closeup of the tool UI
Instead of the more traditional use of joints or locators to specify interaction or exit points, I implemented custom nodes in Maya which inherit from Maya DAG nodes and have their own unique graphic.
This was a more straightforward way of authoring these assets, especially for animated assets which already have their own joints.
Interactable Furniture Authoring
Dozens of characters needed multiple LOD (level of detail) meshes for in-game performance.
Solution: A script that automatically generates all needed LOD meshes starting from the base mesh, saving 100+ hours of modelling time
LOD Mesh Auto Generator
PoseBlender is a flexible tool that allows any number of poses to be stored and blended between on either a full skeleton or parts of it. The poses can be stored to the shelf and pulled back up later. It can also be used in hand animation as an alternative or a complement to set-driven keys. Written in Mel.
Pose Blender Tool
The existing exporter lacked flexibility, exporting by hand was arduous and time consuming for artists.
Solution: A custom vehicle exporter script that gives more flexibility to the artists and greater control over what gets exported and how.
Custom Vehicle Export Tool
As updated versions of art assets were made, 100+ art assets has to be repeatedly exported
Solution: A batch automation script that allows the user to input exactly which files to export automatically
Batch Exporter
Rigging
While not seeking a pure rigging position, I try to keep a moderate level of proficiency with it in order to support artists and contribute to animation pipelines.
-Dynamics on hair and tail, using Maya hair follicles to drive the joint chains
-FK/IK blending on the legs, and "reverse hoof" setup
-FK/IK switch on the arms, and set-driven keys to control the hands
-IK Spline on the horse spine
-FK human spine with set driven keys
Centaur Rig
-IK spline driven spine
-IK/FK switch for arms, forearm twist, set driven keys on hands
-IK/FK blending for legs, with twist
-Reverse foot setup
-Facial setup
Human Male Rig
Rigging and animation was done by me to simulate environment destruction. The physics was simulated in Maya.
