Tool Development for Avatar Pipeline ...

In the last few months I have been working a bit on the avatar system here at Little Bridge. I am responsible for improving the avatar pipeline and also creating and integrating more assets to the avatar. This involved a lot of restructuring of scene files and some rigging & skinning.

As the avatar assets are not only used in Unity but also in Flash, I needed to come up with a tool which deals with rendering of each single item of the avatar (sometimes in conjuntion with other i.e. bodyparts or the mattes) and also the avatar's bedroom while adhering to different pre-existing naming conventions as different programs needed access to it. I ended up using Mel and automating the rendering process with only the least necessary user input while maintaining as much flexibility as possible. It really paid off...what used to take one person more than a day in rendering off and on could now be done in a few minutes and the renderfarm could do the rest when running it there.

While I was doing this I also added some features to make it easier in Maya itself to change the look of the avatar as this is often needed for renders for marketing material. This makes it a lot more fun to use I think in Maya itself.

I am looking forward to further improving the avatar and the tools that my colleagues use and making it as quick and easy to deal with as possible.

Avatar System used in conjunction with Unity