• Japanese Building Generator HDA

  6/12/2024toolsdevhoudiniunreal

  This is a demonstration of an HDA tool I created in Houdini that procedurally generates geometry, uvs and UCX collisions for Japanese-style building pieces and layouts. This was made for the 2024 Brigham Young University Senior Capstone Game Project named Shrineflow. I thought it would be a fun challenge to make a tool where people can quickly edit the buildings to a size that's suitable for gameplay.

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• Some Maya Rigging Tools I've Been Working On ...

  10/23/2022toolsdevanimationmaya
  

  While working for the Brigham Young University (BYU) Student Film Project The Witch's Cat, I took part into rigging a frog character that appears in the latter half of the film, as well as worked on a couple of the character rigs for Previs. Although this frog was meant to move in an irregular manner, the complete rig is made out of many components that could be proceduralized, and so I designed a set of rigging tools that could help me and other future riggers at BYU built rigs faster. Bend-bow Creator Bend-bows are used in rigging to bend extremities of characters in a cartoon-y manner. They are useful in conveying weight and fluidity to the limbs, and they can be extremely laborious to make. After getting tired of doing the same procedure for two arms, I decided to make a tool that will take any joint chain and create bend-bows procedurally. The code to this tool runs on the Maya python API and can be found here. Joint Ribbon Generator After making the bend-bow creator, I thought: Why stop there? I wanted to figure out how much of this rigging process I could proceduralize. And so I created a joint ribbon generator tool that will create a ribbon rig given the poly-edges that make up a character's mouth. The script for this tool can be found here.

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• Maya-Unreal Livelink Animation Transfer Tool

  9/6/2022toolsdevmayaunreal

  This is a tool I developed for the Previs team of our 2023 (expected release date) Brigham Young University (BYU) Student Film. The tool was intended for Animators using Livelink from Maya to stream animations to Unreal. With the press of a button, all the animations import automatically from Maya to Unreal. This was also my very first time using the Unreal Python API to create a Utility Tool that extended to other platforms. In this case, within my Utility Tool Menu, the user can select the Open Maya scene Livelink-ed to Unreal, select an animated rig from that scene in Maya, and import both the Rig and the Animation into Unreal or just the Animation if the Skeleton already exists in Unreal. It's a little rough, but it was fun to scroll through all the Unreal and Maya related forums for research. It was in these nights where I also made the unfortunate discovery that the Unreal Python API Documentation pages have absolutely no dark-mode, so I spent most of my time spent staring at a blinding-white screen in the dark animation labs.

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