Tool Development

Cloth and Asset Tools

Working with the Head of 3D Geometry at Spree3D, I developed a series of tools for Animation, Modeling, and Cloth Simulation. These tools use a proprietary Maya plugin tailored to the company’s pipeline and the authoring of digital assets used by the company’s application.

Tools Collection

In-house tools ship in a custom Maya shelf deployed with the proprietary Maya plug-in. I established iconography and tool UI design.

The collection covers mesh retopology, custom deformers, batching, editing alembic caches, transferring UVs and face sets, combining objects, concatenating cameras and alembic caches, weight maps, review and testing utilities, and more.

UI Classes

I was responsible for the design and implementation of the tools UI and scripts. Using object-oriented programming, we created an array of UI classes from a main UI class containing common methods, widgets, and layouts. That allowed updating common behavior across the entire tool set — for example right-click menus on custom button widgets, versioning options, logging, and batching UI sections. The main UI class also contains methods for rapid widget creation to reduce redundancy in subclasses, and supports shared sections such as running headless Maya processes or adding logging/publishing capabilities.

Deformers and Batching

Some tools work with proprietary deformers to edit and propagate changes to static models and simulation caches so artists can fix cloth animations without re-simulating. Deformation tools are also critical for editing animation caches while testing against proprietary technology.

Two UIs support each deformer: one to apply and edit the deformer on an object, and another to batch the deformer across other sizes of the object.

To batch efficiently, I developed a wrapper to launch Maya headlessly from the command line for batching scripts — multiple headless instances can run an order of magnitude faster than an interactive Maya session.

I also built a multi-deformer batch tool to apply deformers sequentially. Together with other automation, this sped up workflows with minimal artist involvement beyond edit, test, and review.