Technical Art for Games » Games

Biped Editor for Unity 3.0

Adam — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:27:33 +0000

I’ve been really head-down for awhile with work, the latest of which has involved some pretty substantial refactoring of Touch KO for a big update this summer (finally!). Since I’ve been working in Unity 3.0, I thought I’d share a short clip of a tool I developed during the refactoring process. It’s a biped component along with an editor for interactively adjusting collision shapes and sizes as well as joint limits. The component also has functionality to perform an automatic mass distribution based on human values, as well as interfaces for entering and exiting ragdoll. If I manage to get caught up on things after the update I’ll probably share the code on here eventually, but as anyone who follows the site may have guessed it’s been really busy lately O_o.

Note: for best viewing, I recommend turning the resolution on the video up to 1080p and watching full-screen, since that’s my native resolution and it will be easier to read some of the buttons.

New Plug-in Coming Soon: AM_Ribbon

Adam — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:54:58 +0000

Things have been unusually hectic so far this year, and with GDC on the horizon it’s not looking to be much clearer for awhile. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t found a way to make all of my different obligations overlap in some ways! I’ve been working a little bit as a consultant over the last few months to help out Infinite Ammo with an upcoming title: Marian.

During the course of my work on the project, I developed a new Python plug-in for Maya to help out with hair modeling. I will hopefully have a chance to deploy a new version of my free Python package soon that will include it, but in the meantime I thought I might share this video that Alec posted up on the IA website where I show what the plug-in does. Hopefully some other folks out there will find it useful too!

Setting up your PYTHONPATH environment variable globally on OSX

Adam — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:29:00 +0000

Here’s another time-saver for OSX users. Don’t use environment.plist for global environment variables!

When you want to add locations to your Python path, you have a couple of different options. Ryan talked about this in greater detail on his site, so I won’t go into the details for all of these. If you want to permanently add locations to your path, you have three general alternatives:

Use sys.path.append() in your userSetup.py file
Set the value for PYTHONPATH in your maya.env file
Set the value for PYTHONPATH at the system level

Autodesk’s documentation can help you figure out the first two methods reasonably well, and they work fine for most situations. However, if you have locations you want to use with Maya as well as other interpreters, the third option may be helpful. While doing this on Windows is relatively easy, it is a little painful on Mac OSX.

Most Google searching will send you to some variation on this technique, whereby you create an environment.plist file containing the value for your PYTHONPATH variable and place it in a folder ~/.MacOSX. Maybe this will work for you, but maybe it won’t. It didn’t work for me. What’s the problem?

Apparently, when you start an application from Spotlight as opposed to Finder, it has a different parent process—one that does not use the environment.plist file. I have gotten used to using Spotlight to start all of my applications and to perform the majority of my menu operations because it saves me huge amounts of time while working (and I don’t want to have to remember where stuff is). Fortunately, there is a fix that will ensure your environment variables will be properly set in all contexts. I suggest you read about the details if you are interested, but if you just want to work then use the following solution:

If you do not have a launchd.conf file in /etc then create one
Edit launchd.conf to contain a line like this: setenv PYTHONPATH /Users/Shared/Autodesk/maya/scripts
Reboot

You can now confirm that this has worked by opening Terminal from Spotlight and entering the set command.

Touch KO is out!

Adam — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:54:43 +0000

I’m out of town right now, so have to be pretty brief, but I wanted to say that Touch KO is finally out now! You can pick it up in the App Store for a special launch sale price of $2.99! Perfect for blowing off some steam if you’re waiting around somewhere.

Maya Python – The Book

Adam — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:57:47 +0000

Well we have finally wrapped up development on Touch KO! The last few weeks have been hectic as we had some last-minute requirements sort of indirectly imposed on us by Apple, but everything is wrapped up and sent off to Chillingo.

One of my next projects is a book on the Maya Python API for Morgan Kaufmann (publisher of David Gould’s Complete Maya Programming texts). Ryan Trowbridge and I will be working on this together over the next year, so it is sure to be fun and exciting. We have a pretty comprehensive plan for what the book will cover, but please do feel free to contact either of us if there are specific things you would like to see!

In other news, Crane Wars, the newest Blurst game, was released a couple weeks ago. Among other things, I focused primarily on the characters in it. I did a post awhile ago that showed the facial rigs I created for them. Go play it now!