Cogshire: Pipeline Development

Part of my responsibilities on the Cogshire project included designing ways to get assets from concept into engine. There were several ideas we wanted to implement that no one knew how to get into the UT3 engine. It fell on me to find a solution to such issues and to train the rest of the […]

Part of my responsibilities on the Cogshire project included designing ways to get assets from concept into engine. There were several ideas we wanted to implement that no one knew how to get into the UT3 engine. It fell on me to find a solution to such issues and to train the rest of the team on implementing my solutions. These are two tutorials I wrote for the team to refference:

Maya to UT3 [Skeletal Mesh]
This was just a quick guideline to help our animator get his work in engine quickly and efficiently.

Hair Dynamics IK Solver
This was a solution I came up with when our animator wanted to implement dangling cables, hoses, and wires. The UT3 engine we were using required all animation of skeletal mesh objects to be directly animated by the joints. He wanted natural flowing animations without having to manually key every joint in the skeleton. I came up with this as a solution and wrote a tutorial so that he could implement my solution on the assets he was animating.

I also set up and implemented a naming convention as we were all working remotely with only myself and the team leader actually importing finished assets into the engine. At times we generated pipeline problems when an asset was not prepped correctly for the engine or when naming conventions were not followed and conflicts arose. It was my responsibility to resolve any and all issues that arose on the fly.