Gears of War 3: Building a better pipeline (Character TD)

BlvdNights

Really cool talk about the different kinds of animation tools, their uses, and the pros and cons of them.


http://youtu.be/64wpXowpvIU

slipsius

Thank you Thank you Thank you. Great talk! just finishing it up now!

Jeremy is a beast at this stuff. dammmnnn

Bigjohn

How come he had to write a specialized script to mimic Biped's functions (like copy from one side to the other) in Maya? Doesn't Maya have similar tools?

Also, I thought it was really neat how they used referenced rigs, and then have the scripts check if those files are up to date and update accordingly. Is this possible to accomplish in Max? I've never seen an actual example of referenced rigs in Max.

jipe

Biped's functions work because it knows exactly how the rig is structured (just like Motionbuilder). In Maya, everyone is going to set up their rigs differently -- so scripts like flipping poses require knowing what your rig hierarchy looks like. The tech artists here built an entire suite of tools for things that "should" be built into Maya... the end advantage is flexibility.

slipsius

Maya does have mirror joint options, but they are also within the menus. Having it build into his easy ui is nice as well, and makes things quicker for the users

Bigjohn

I was under the impression that he scripted the actual functionality himself, as opposed to using one of Maya's built-in functions.

slipsius

It looks like he did. But his version is probably more in tune with what he needs for his autorig. Where as Maya's tool has a bunch of options you need to select to get the desired affects. Probably a little less what he needs, as well.

dr jekyll

Bigjohn wrote: »

I was under the impression that he scripted the actual functionality himself, as opposed to using one of Maya's built-in functions.

For an application that is essentially just a bunch of open mel scripts,
Extensibility is a BUILT IN Maya function.

And was at one time celebrated for it.

leslievdb

i really liked this talk, some very neat features and great how he keeps on improving everything