Mae Techmeier

Tools Development

I've created a few different tools now for use within Maya, and while none are publicly available for usage, I do make habit of jotting down my process as I go.

The blog posts accessible by the top menu cover my thought process and workflow in creating some of these tools. It's helpful to look back on old tools and processes I make more and transform my approach, and thus I keep these pages as a tool for my future self.

Moldable Head Gear System
[Single Head Gear for all heads]

This system was a unique approach to dealing with the model bloat that happens in larger projects when you have many heads of varying shapes and sizes that need to be able to wear the same exact helmet. Often the team's only choice is to duplicate the helmet and make it fit each head by manually adjusting the shape of the helmet mesh. This system and tool bypassed that need by making a helmet that would programmatically stretch and rotate to fit all given heads.

It was based in DEM bones, a library that has become well loved and used in the industry, but took things a step further by using a decomposition to allow us to match the change in vert positions from the face to take a very well educated guess as to how the mesh of the helm would need to change to accommodate it. From there we added a custom skeleton for the helm and back solved the change in position, rotation and scale required of each joint for the vertexes to end up in the right positions.

As this was proprietary development there's unfortunately not much more I can say, but it is something I truly wish I could have written for the masses on because it worked wonderfully once we got past it's minor hiccups. Instead of having 35 unique copies of the same helmet we had one mesh serving 35 unique heads, and the size on disk savings were delicious.

Asset Hub
[An Asset Management System and Exporter]

A tool based off of a much older personal project called AMS, which grew into a tool used by the entire Character Art Team at Monolith Productions. This tool allowed users to do a large variety of tasks that concerned character assets. These included but were not limited to the following:

Create Proxy stub ins of future assets that had been assigned to Outsourcing. These stubs would be automatically integrated into the engine with a placeholder mesh, materials would be generated with the correct naming conventions as dictated by user created rules. All created and edited files would be automatically checked out to the user in perforce, and folders would be created as needed to fulfill the rules of the naming convention.
Integrate or Update existing character assets without having to ever open the engine.
- Allowed the user to update all the metadata on a mesh or skeleton, even material assignments to sections of mesh were editable in this way.
Move, Rename and Delete any asset once, and it will move, rename or delete all of it's connected files, including it's maya source files, and all in engine integrated files. Highly customizable, allowing the user to pick and choose for every connected file if they desire specific action to be taken.
User created Rules system that allowed the users to define the Naming Convention to be used as well as the Files to be created or altered during the creation/editing of a given asset.
In depth search window that utilized windows metadata tagging on files to help filter the results.
A skin weight referencing panel that allowed the users to import a skin weight reference and automatically copy it's weights onto the existing mesh and then clean up the scene of all the reference elements after the copy is complete.
And many more small quality of life features that were integral to the smooth integration of assets into the engine.

Complex Weight Mirroring
[Highly Bone Dense Mirroring Tool]

A tool that generates pairs on the joints of a highly dense skeleton that is unable to utilize the built-in Maya skin mirroring tools for easy mirroring and precise results.

Designed for heavy skeletons that have many overlapping joints. It efficiently seperates, pairs and mirrors weights on skeletons with over a thousand joints in only 2 seconds.

Straightforwards UI, easily callable from a drop down menu.

Mirroring over is clean and leaves no residual weight on the opposite side.

Central joints that have no partner, mirror with themselves.

Metadata attributes are added to joints in order for them to individually understand their partner if they're mirroring right to left, left to right etc.

AMS
[Asset Management System]

An Asset Management System that generates a database and metadata like searchable tags and understanding of the pipeline states to make finding files in a massive project file easier and faster for everyone. (Includes a tag for Game Ready)