Unreal Engine, Maya, Blender, Python, Blueprint, MML

SUMMARY

• Supporting the art team with tools, automation, and all things technical.
• Designed, assisted, planned, and executed pipeline development for modular character creation. From DCC, to web, to Unreal.
• Developed and extended character tools used by another technical artist/rigger.
• Various R&D and prototyping from VFX, complex shaders, graphic features, character customization to procedural content generation.
• Profiling and optimization.
• Collaborated with engineers, tech designers, artists, and producers on all these efforts.

TOOLS/SCRIPTS (WIP detail will be added) – https://gist.github.com/aobond2

• Maya Rig Exporter (Tagging system, various validation, naming, export automation, auto thumbnail)
  • Started out as automation for character exporting and validation. Later on the tool expand with many other functionality
    • Rendering thumbnail of each body parts (with consistent lighting, angle and framing)
    • Repathing/finding textures when the Maya files opened on different machine
      • This is important as Improbable use GLB and need the textures properly embedded with the model. Unlike FBX workflow that lots of the texture assigning happen in Unreal.
    • GLTF/GLB exporting (using Babylon exporter API)
    • Limiting bone influence.
    • Connecting to other internal CLI tool within Improbable to automate fixing character/avatar for web viewer.
      • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/80c7088b63ea7391f7f99e7a3f9e3146
    • Various bespoke exporting options that relevant to different project within Improbable (NFT traits, etc)
  • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/0a1e73068e28f0a13efb5fd74b3a7ca5
  • QT Designer for UI

• Blender Auto Thumbnail
  • The script take lists of objects/assets create cameras, lights, set render settings then iterate and do render of each asset to make nice consistent thumbnails.
  • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/7001f51c16f1f7f033c71dbb94597283
• Morph target related automation
  • Transfer blendshape between mesh with different topology
    • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/f9c9ed202050c165b48acd1fc4d72e51
  • Auto create blendshape from separate Maya file
    • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/2c3b528ccae83e2c31f9e193f189e842
• Blender various baking automation
  • Ambient occlusion, curvature and other map to vertex colour.
  • Packing them all to be usable within Unreal.
  • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/6823ab471c22cc538ef813d03a3f38c8
• Scripts to make CSV from existing GLB files stored online then construct MML avatar from the newly created CSV.
  • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/31a9bdd4f2bbd49da9a1fcfc3965e74e
  • https://gist.github.com/aobond2/34eabe7ab65a6daf94b797c7c0dd99db
  • More info on MML – https://mml.io/
• More…

VFX + SHADERS (WIP will have more details soon)

• Enabling and optimising various VFX to run on thousands of real player with good performance
  • Niagara Data Channel, Niagara effect type, data interface
  • Profiling VFX using Unreal Insights and Niagara Debugger

• Hands on Niagara VFX creation
  • Hype Meter
  • Various Niagara VFX (Will expand on this more)
• Collaborating with engineers and technical designer on implementation and optimisation

• Fullscreen postprocessing fx
• More…