“We cannot do great things on this Earth, only make awesome tools and clean code with great love.”
FEATURES:
Automatically Distributed Tools Updates || Web Based Digital Asset Management System || Engine Caching Servers || Perforce Servers and Proxies
Programs:
Maya 2011-2015 || Quixel Suite || Substance Designer || Photoshop || PySide (Qt) || Python 2.7
Tools Infrastructure
The biggest concern here is not how to engineer the menus but how to do it without interfering with the tools our clients give us. Its a class based system that was set up to allow us to micromanage how the various elements and tools are loaded. For Maya the startup is sparked by just a couple of lines easily added to our existing userSetup.py or a userSetup given by the client.
Beta Tools
A menu that checks the current username against a compiled list of authorized users. Allows us to test new tools and tool updates prior to studio wide releases.
Automated Updates
Everytime a supported application opens if it can connect to the update server then it will update all of the required local files, if it cannot then it will default to the previous set of local files and alert the user to contact IT about the network issue. This is based of the idea of a userSetup file much like Maya but it is done by calling a python file prior to opening the desired program.
Web Based Digital Asset Management
A web server that parses and caches a set of predefined set of image directories using python and json files. The result is a rapidly rendering webpage designed to display the images (textures and reference) using the organization defined by the directory structure. It is based off of the open source Photo Float project which has a very easy to expand backend. This will allow for new file formats and asset types to be added easily.
Maya
Clean Extract, Clean Combine, & Clean Separate:
Same concept as the Maya versions except that they clean up after themselves, no history, the outliner has no extra nodes, and the name and pivot is inherited as you would expect.
Perforce Submission Monitor:
A babysitter for Perforce submissions. Often times due to the relative geographic isolation of China as well as the Great Firewall Perforce submissions can take quite a long time. The Submission Monitor watches over the submissions and if they fail then retries up to X number of times. This tool can also monitor a queue of changelists to submit them in order. Errors will return if the submissions fail beyond the variable limit.
INCREMENTAL SAVE:
Generates a directory in the same location as your current file and begins to save numbered files into it automagically while also saving over the base file. VCS friendly!! :D
Tools Updater Window:
A bilingual window that opens when you start Maya that contains updates to the tools, servers, tutorials, and workflows as well as links to the appropriate documentation.
PhotoshoP
Photoshop panel that is automatically integrated into the artists' computers using the same system mentioned above. Easy to update and runs from the same directory structure as all of the other tools. It can load and run scripts and actions. Works extremely well for organizing a list of actions we want to make sure is on every computer.