Friday 23 November 2012
New Adventures
Well, After 6 years at Eurocom it's all come to a end. It's a shame because there was some truly brilliant artists and programmers there. It's also exciting times. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Onwards and upwards.
Sunday 11 November 2012
Maya Rig Builder
A few years ago I stumbled across a paper by Bungie detailing their metaData structure they used to track complex data in Maya and build better tools. At the time at Eurocom we were struggling with the shear amount of data we had started to produce with next gen content. Rigs had become more complex, we were doing 4 projects each with different character requirements. Cartoon style rigs, biped, quadruped and monster style dead space rigs. All our tools had to work with these variants. The paper seemed like the answer to our problems.
So I wrote a metaData API at home and brought it into Eurocom and tried to hook it into our rig builder code. At the time we were transitioning to python from MEL and we had bit's of code all over the place. The metaData API enabled us to bring OO design to the rig. It was a pain to retrospectively hack into the MEL calls, but it was worth it. It's been a few years now. The rig is still MEL with callbacks that fill the metaData structures and set the metaData properties. Some of it is python, it's evolving every day and new modules are really seeing the benefit.
The concept is now in a lot of our tools outside of Rigs. The environment asset pipeline is carrying metaData, which in turn is getting output via our internal tools and making it into the engine. It's a pretty sweet system and is a lot like Maya's assemblies feature that came in 2013.5.
I've been digging around in my laptop and found an old UI mock up for my Rig Builder I use at home. It's based on my metaData API that I've evolved separately. Perhaps one day I'll be able to release these tools.
So I wrote a metaData API at home and brought it into Eurocom and tried to hook it into our rig builder code. At the time we were transitioning to python from MEL and we had bit's of code all over the place. The metaData API enabled us to bring OO design to the rig. It was a pain to retrospectively hack into the MEL calls, but it was worth it. It's been a few years now. The rig is still MEL with callbacks that fill the metaData structures and set the metaData properties. Some of it is python, it's evolving every day and new modules are really seeing the benefit.
The concept is now in a lot of our tools outside of Rigs. The environment asset pipeline is carrying metaData, which in turn is getting output via our internal tools and making it into the engine. It's a pretty sweet system and is a lot like Maya's assemblies feature that came in 2013.5.
I've been digging around in my laptop and found an old UI mock up for my Rig Builder I use at home. It's based on my metaData API that I've evolved separately. Perhaps one day I'll be able to release these tools.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)