tools:programming

Tools - Python/MEL/Maya API                                                                                               
Hair Tool Set 
Authoring tools to for polygonal and curve based hair used in run-time and/or cinematics.
  • Styling Tools
    • Intuitive screen space brush tools for combining, masking, cutting, growing, pinching, smoothing, moving, bunching, and adjusting the width, taper, roundness, and twist.
    • Scalp and hair to hair collision
  • nHair
    • Utilizes Maya nHair for cinematic and hi-res source content for texture baking.
  • Geometry
    • Ribbon and fin types
    • Poly conversion w/ LOD generation
    • Auto UV atlas layout using sets
  • Processing tools
    • Vert normal smoothing between scalp and hair mesh
    • Vert color vector combing and smoothing
    • Tween shell creation
    • Transfer tools
  • Texture baking tools
    • Hi-res geo to hair card baking for normal, color mask, AO, depth, binormal, alpha, & vert color.
    • Auto .psd assembly

UV Tool Set
  • Packing
    • Shared shell recognition
    • Find spaces to pack shells in existing layouts
    • Better concave and doughnut hole packing
  • Texal tools
    • Create a texture file for a model at a standard texal density, no need to guess
    • Shell scale ratio matching, to get uniform texal density across shells and models
  • Tiling Assistance
    • Shared vert boarder matching
    • Auto-Edge Alignment
    • Move and Sew w/o rotation
  • Rotation, Translation, Scale
    • Rotate with non-square scale preservation
    • Common task as presets buttons
  • Shell Stacking & Alignment


Vertex Paint Tools
  • Volumetric Bush, this is a critical time saver and quality booster when vert colors influence mesh deformation; shader driven swinging chains, for example.
  • Isolated channel modes, again this is critically useful when the vert RGB colors map to different shader features


River Tool Set – Suite of tools to help create river/water meshes
  • Initial layout is spline based so it's quick to draw down and tweak since the tessellation is procedural
  • After initial layout, vert colors and UV layout is automated by taking the topology into account, i.e. steeper or shallower angles squish and stretch the UV layout to give the effect of faster or slower running water in the resulting asset in-game.
  • Could also be used for road authoring.


Simplygon UI( 3rd party LOD plug-in)
  • Simplified UI, added front and back end automation


Merge Verts
  • Auto distance tolerance, alleviates the need to always go 1 by 1 or tweak the results afterwords.


FBX exporter UI
  • Simplified UI
  • Data collection
  • Version control integration
  • Mesh clean-up/fix


Geometry Brush
  • Paint meshes on another mesh surface, (this is simpler and more functional then the Bonus Tools version that ships with Maya)


Other Tools
  • 3DS Max style curve extrusion (make spline renderable)
  • User Defined Material Setup and Assignment
  • Scale Reference Loader
  • Reset Scene to studio or user defaults



Games                                                                                             __________                

Ebears World Prototype 
Dev Blog
I wanted to prototype a multiplayer 3rd person shooter and thought( wrongly) that it would be quickest to do it in what I knew best... MEL. Way too much time spent fiddling with how the controls felt.
In this video of the prototype running in Maya I'm using two 360 controllers and yes that IS some sweet split screen 2 player action. Also had Wiimote controls.
*character textures by Frank Harmon
Code snippet.



NINJA vs PIRATE
download
Made in 48 hours minus sleep during IGDF Game Jam#6 using Game Maker 8.
Has dumb AI and pseudo path finding.
Hint: A deadly ninja moves quickly and quietly.

Nav buttons are the . ? : ' keys. (thats the keys to the left of enter and shift)


LiftMan
download
Made with Game Maker 8.

Astronophy Prototype
Dev Blog
Made in 48 hours minus sleep during IGDF Game Jam#4,  Feb, 09, with Maya using MEL.
Players control the creation, distance, speed, and mass of planets hurled around a star in space. Their gravity causes them to catastrophically collide into each other or the star. The players goal is to sustain X number of planets in orbit for X amount of time. The difficulty is increased with multiple stars.





Double Nuggets Station and Saloon
Made with Visual Pinball using VBScript.

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