Edited: 6/18/2016: Updated RollbackImporter to support relative imports and “from package import module” syntax. In my last post, I went over writing scripts that can be used to write unit tests for Maya tools and then run those tests from the commandline outside of Maya. In this post, I’ll go over running those tests interactively in Maya. Being able to run tests interactively in Maya will greatly speed up debug times when tracking down issues because you’ll be able to see what is going on in your tests. To make the process more user-friendly, I’ll also add a UI to help execute the tests. Again, all of this code is available on my Github.
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Unit testing is a valuable tool that a lot of studios fail to implement. Unit testing can save a great amount of time and energy (and therefore money) by allowing developers, tool writers, and even content creators to catch broken deliverables before passing them downstream in the pipeline. The lack of unit testing with TD’s is most likely due to one of the following:
The person doesn’t know what unit testing is. The person has heard of unit testing but has no idea how to implement it. The person is in production and believes there is no time for creating unit tests. The person knows what unit tests are and just doesn’t want to do them. In this post, I am going to describe unit testing as it relates to assets and Python tools created for Maya. For those that don’t know, unit testing is pretty much a bunch of Python functions that you write that verify your tool is doing what it is supposed to be doing. For example, if you write an ik/fk switch tool, one unit test could be to load a rig, pose the arm in ik, switch to fk, and then check to see if the arm is in the same place. Another example is if you write a blendShape exporter, you can write tests to make sure the shapes are properly recreated when you import them into a new scene. Unit testing gives developers the confidence to update their code and assets with the certainty that their updates are not breaking any existing functionality.
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I have officially joined the game industry! After 8 years in the film and feature animation industry, I decided to switch over and try the game industry. I accepted a Craft Director position at Visceral Games of Electronic Arts where I will be helping with character and cinematics technology. Lots of exciting challenges await!
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I have finally released my GPU-Driven Wrap Deformer video series! It is 55 videos totaling over 12 hours of content. The code for the wrap deformer is free so if you can’t or don’t want to purchase the series, you can get the code on my github.
To checkout and/or purchase the series click here.
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My next video series is in progress. You can check out the introduction video here and download the open source code on my GitHub.
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Jan 19, 2015
CMake
Maya
Maya
New year, new site design! I’ve posted some free videos talking about how to compile Maya plug-ins on all platforms using CMake. Check them out here:
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I have some lessons in mind but I am curious as to what sort of lessons people are interested in.
Possible topics could be:
Writing a Wrap Deformer Writing Mesh Collision Deformer Writing a Production Pipeline with Django Facial Rigging for VFX Advanced Maya API PySide for VFX and Animation Comment on this post and suggest a lesson!
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Sep 9, 2013
CGCircuit
Maya
I released a new tutorial series over at CGCircuit called Writing a Production-Ready Skin Exporter with the Python API. In the videos I go over how to create a more robust skin weight exporter that also handles joint renaming. Head on over and check it out.
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Faceshift, the markerless facial capture company, demonstrated their latest tech at Siggraph using the Sven character from Autodesk’s Hyperspace Madness project. We helped out with the rigging. I wrote the facial system and our awesome modelers created the facial shapes. You can check out Sven at both the 4:09 mark and the 6:30 mark. The quality achieved with Faceshifts system is pretty impressive!
Update: Found some more videos
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I’m updating my site theme with Bootstrap goodies. I’m now mobile friendly! Please let me know if anything is amiss.
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