Scott Clary

Animation Retargeter

For retargeting 300+ legacy animations to updated character rig.

• When creating a new Player Character for Star Stable Online we decided to build a new higher-fidelity rig.
• We needed to maintain backwards compatibility with ten years' of existing Player Character animations — over 300 animations.
• We no longer had the source animation files for many of these animations.
• I developed this tool to retarget the animation data in our game files to our new Maya rig.
• Inspired by Unreal Engine 5's new IK-based animation retargeting system I implemented something similar in Maya.
• Retargeted animation to both IK and FK rig controls.

Scene Validator

Rapidly detect game-breaking bugs and automatically fix them.

• Detects errors in the Maya scene.
• Red for errors that our game engine could not tolerate.
• Yellow for warnings that would not break our game but are commonly overlooked inefficiencies in game assets.
• Automatically fix detected issues.
• Detecting and fixing issues deliberately separated in case an artist wished to manually fix an issue.
• This enables the same code to be reused to generate automated reports on asset library.
• Detailed report of issues encountered for manual debugging.
• Automatically selects the node or component in the Maya scene when selected in the report UI.
• Report can be copied to clipboard in a human-readable format to send in a Slack message or for logging.
• User can configure which issues to check for and which to ignore.
• Presets to quickly enable/disable issues based on asset type. For example, skinned meshes, static meshes, environment assets, or props.
• User can configure which nodes are checked and ignored in case not every node in the scene requires checking.

Modular Auto-Rig

Rapidly rig entire characters and individual body parts.

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Builds a fully-functional rig in moments.

Rigging an arm.

Demonstrating the IK/FK pose swap feature.

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Template rigs for common character types like biped or quadruped.
Individual body part rigs that can be Lego-bricked together for atypical characters.

• Designed to make rigging common character types fast and easy even if the characters have vastly different proportions.
• Builds a fully-functional rig complete with ik/fk switches, pose swapping, and three modes to control the spine.
• Rigs built to be compatible with animation sharing in most 3D game engines and Maya.
• Joints are automatically oriented allowing the user to freely reposition the template locators without concern for the orientation of the joints' local rotation axes.
• Rig templates constructed from Auto-Rig Modules allowing for new templates to be built as necessary.
• IK/FK pose swapping tool seamlessly switches between IK and FK modes by automatically positioning the IK or FK controllers to precisely match the current pose.
• Creates a network of Maya custom nodes called the Meta-Rig that tools such as IK/FK pose swapping rely on. This makes the tools and rig resilient to users' custom rig and name changes.
• Designed to be expandable with new modules as the project demands, such as: “dragon wing”, “scorpion tail”, or “low-budget spine”.

Exporters and Batch Tool

For exporting game-ready skinned meshes and animations.

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Clothing Exporter: Checks scene for errors, generates body type variations, skins, and exports.

Batch Tool: Fast and intuitive file browser for executing operations on multiple files.
Used to batch export skinned meshes, retarget animations, publish files to branch, and more.

Warlords Exporter: single-click export the character data you want and none of the scene trash you don't.

Warlords export data stored in a simple node network.

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• Star Stable Online's clothing exporter enabled artists to iterate on clothing meshes without destroying skinning or blend shape data.
• Integrated with Scene Validator to check for errors before exporting.
• Automatically generates body variations and imports skinning data.
• Previews a list of all nodes that will be exported for quick and easy debugging and validation.
• Star Stable Online's batch tool is a fast and intuitive file browser for executing operations on multiple files.
• Used to batch export skinned meshes, retarget animations, publish files to branch, and more.
• Warlords' Exporter stored data like the destination path and which nodes to export in the Maya scene in a custom Maya export node.
• No more export selected > navigate file browser > confirm overwrite file every time you need to export. Does not depend on brittle naming conventions and directory structure heuristics to batch export.
• Previews a list of all nodes that will be exported for quick and easy debugging.
• Destination path stored as a relative path so the whole team can use the same export settings.
• Automatically configures export settings based on naming conventions and directory structure to save set-up time.
  All settings are manually configurable in case the tool guesses wrong.

Clothing Refitter

Generates variations of a mesh to fit different body shapes.

• Eliminates a significant amount work when artists produce a new clothing mesh.
• Enables artists to iterate on clothing meshes without repeating their edits on every variation of the asset.
• Preserves skinning on the generated meshes by copying the original's skinning by vertex order.
• Star Stable Online's new player character relies on this tool to deliver new body type customization options to players.

Skinning Tools

Variety of tools improve skinning workflow, quality, and speed.

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Delta Mush Skinning: Leverages Maya's Bake Deformer tool to generate superior results to other default skinning methods.

Compare the results of Delta Mush skinning to other default skinning methods.

SkinIO: Quickly and easily preserve and restore skinning data when a model's vert order is destroyed.

Added a vertex order surface association to Maya's Copy Skin Weights tool.

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• Delta Mush Skinning method uses the Delta Mush deformer and Maya's Bake Deformer tool to produce excellent auto-generated skinning.
• Often produces better result than other skinning methods such as Classic Linear and Geodesic Voxel.
• SkinIO quickly saves a backup of the user's current skin data to be restored after iterating on the mesh.
• Eliminates skinning rework when modifying a mesh after it has been skinned.
• Vertex Order method added to Maya's Copy Skin Weights tool.
• Maya's native Copy Skin Weights tool is fast and accurate, but lacks an option to copy weights by vert order.
• Most vert order copy weight scripts depend on the source and target meshes to be bound to identical skeletons.
• My Vertex Order method mimic's Maya's Influence Association feature enabling weights to be copied between differing skeletons.

Maya Unit Tests

Improved pipeline reliability with unit tests executed in Maya standalone.

• Wrote MayaTestCase by extending Python's unittest.TestCase with functionality to run Maya in standalone mode.
• Enables tech artists and tools developers to leverage IDE debuggers while executing Maya commands.
• Alerts developers when code changes have altered the behavior of tools being used by the art team.
• I've discovered and fixed bugs in regularly-used tools before any team member could be affected.

Star Stable Online

A horse game full of adventures!

Helped ship regular content updates for an MMO with over a decade of legacy and player expectations.

• Key contributor in releasing a new, more-customizable, backwards-compatible Player Character.
• Player 2.0 can equip all the clothing assets the previous player character could and includes new customization features.
• I planned, prototyped, and developed the art pipeline we used to create the new player character.
• I played a key roll in coordinating between gameplay programmers, engine programmers, 3D artists, animators, and product management.
• Developed Maya tools such as: animation retargeter, scene validator, clothing refitter, and exporters.
• Helped research and develop new game engine features and character rig features.
• Supported and mentored a 16-person character team and liaisoned with the engine team.
• Acted as Maya, Perforce, and game engine tech support for the character team. Regularly troubleshooting development issues with artists.
• Coordinated with the engine and art teams and helped implement a large content update necessary to support new animation engine improvements.
• Tested and produced prototype art for multiple new engine features such as a new animation state machine, skinned mesh importer features, and blend shape features.
• Assisted with the hiring process of new team members: identifying project needs, interfacing with recruitment team, interviewing candidates, and onboarding new hires.
• Trained and mentored multiple teams on Perforce best practices and branch/merge strategies.
• Gave multiple workshops on various Maya topics from best practices to ensure relative reference paths, to rigging and skinning fundamentals, to more advanced skinning techniques.
• Gave multiple workshops on efficient branch/merge strategies and tools available in Perforce.
• Coordinated with engine and art teams and helped implement a large content update necessary to support new animation engine improvements.
• Tested and produced prototype art for multiple new engine features such as a new animation state machine, skinned mesh importer features, and blend shape features.

Warlords of Aternum

Collect heroes to take into strategic turn-based battles!

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As both lead of the Warlords art team and technical artist I helped our team ship many content updates to our players.
warlordsofaternum.com

• Warlords already had several years worth of art assets collected when I joined the team.
• The game and most of its art content was originally developed by a different studio. InnoGames acquired Warlords and all of its content, but none of its original developers.
• My teammates and I had to dive into this project blind and reverse engineer it so that we could start delivering new content to our players.
• I joined the team as a tech artist and have played a significant role in shipping nearly every 3D art asset our team has released.
• From implementing our first character; to adding new armor sets to every playable character; to releasing a new continent of enemies, environments, and playable characters I have been reverse engineering, bug fixing, implementing, and automating our art content and content pipelines.
• One year after joining the team I was asked to take over as art lead.
• As art lead I was responsible for planning our releases, managing our team of artists, and maintaining the art direction of the project.
• With no other technical artist on the team I had to juggle these new responsibilities while continuing to directly contribute to our releases.
• I appeared in several promotional YouTube videos to announce our latest feature releases to our players.
• Jerrika Event Announcement
• Factions Feature Announcement
• Alliance Quest Feature Announcement

EVE Online

Cool-assed spaceship game. Check it out.

As a technical artist on the character and flying-in-space graphics teams I am proud to have been a part of bringing a bunch of space-ships and space-characters to EVE players.

• I helped develop the EVE Online character creator.
• I was part of the graphics team responsible for updating all of EVE Online's space content to be compatible with PBR shaders.
• I helped ship a bunch of spaceships.