Initially, the thought of turning nothing but a drawing into a useable mesh in a production seemed like a crazy idea. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to try and see how far I could get. It turns out, quite far. This tool is still in its early days. I have several ideas on how to continue to improve the quality of the meshes it generates as well as increase the scope of the assets it can handle. I did the bulk of the implementation over a weekend, but came back a few times over the course of two weeks to try different approaches and to optimize the speed and stability of the tool. One of my early approaches was using the concept as a height map on the mesh, but this was both slow (30s to generate) and required a lot of memory. I suppose I could have tried intelligently pooling geometry but eventually I discarded this approach, which put me on a much better path and resulted in the tool below, which runs at nearly real-time.

The Armature builder is really a framework on which to hang meshes and assemble more complex designs. The idea is that all of the pieces assemble and adjust in a sensible way; they are aware of and can adapt to each other. The template is like a puppet driving a much more complex machine. The robotic arm that is generated here is based on an input arm mesh, but could really be anything from a race car, in which tires and spoilers are added, subtracted or rearranged, to a head, in which horns, hair or helmets are draped. I have a lot of ideas on how this technology could be pushed further and used to cater to whatever genre of game is being made. This tool could generate a lot of variation from a relatively small amount of input meshes over the course of a production and into DLC.

The Panel Generator tool was born out of a desire to automate the creation of fitted armour suits. I also see potential for this tool to generate organic scale patterns or even just cobble stones with random extrusion amounts. With version 0.2 of this tool I will be looking to provide more artistic direction to the patterns generated as well as potentially emulating humanoid muscle groups, since that seems to be a common design choice.

Authoring hair for video games has a lot of pain points (i.e., sorting hair cards, UV’ing, making adjustments, etc). The idea behind this tool was to take data from Zbrush, an application that most artists are comfortable in, and then create a fluid pipeline to convert a Fibermesh into a useable hair arrangement for a real-time engine. I personally have wanted to build a tool/script to layout hair cards in a spiral for years, but no tech artist or graphics programmer seemed keen enough on the idea. I also wanted tools that would allow me to sort the hair based on an arbitrary object that I placed. This tool dynamically sorts hair cards, laying out UVs based on their location relative to the crown object (red is closest, violet is furthest away). Because all hair can be unwrapped in a consistent way, the artist only needs to create a master or generic tangency map, anisotropic map, etc.

I created my own “polygon-based” creep SOP in order to have the crown object ride the meshes it is used on. My creep sop can use either UV’s (which the tool generates for itself) or a Raycast based method to stick and travel along the mesh.

I have a lot of additional features in mind for this tool. Version 0.2 will likely be based out of H14 (waiting for more stable builds) and will feature some non-destructive hair grooming and creation tools as well as the ability to transfer hair to other meshes. I also hope to be able to expand the users ability to edit hair cards by region.