I’ve recently had a chance to checkout the NEX plugin for Maya. It’s now available on OS X and Linux! NEX adds a drastic improvement to the Maya modeling workflow and pretty much a must have if you work in Maya. In this video, I show how NEX can be used to do retopology in Maya.

I finally got a chance to check out TopoGun 2.0 beta 2. Beta 2 brings a new Brush system to the application and makes light work of adjusting topology. The Brush system works very similar to brushes in other packages such as Maya, modo and Mudbox. My favorite feature is the Relax Brush. During my topo session, I found that using the relax brush was a great way to smooth out and get a more uniform spacing between polygons. By dialing in some falloff, you can easily modulate the strength of the smoothing. Here’s a quick video that showcases the Relax Brush in action.

I’ve been working on a character for my game project. My workflow is to design the character in ZBrush starting with Dynamesh to freeform the design. I use Dynamesh to build the base mesh and refine overall form. I then move from Dynamesh to Subdivision levels to further refine and add large details. At this stage, the key is to focus on large detail and not try and add every single nuance of the surface. I refined the character to a point and then moved to the retopology stage. Using Dynamesh did give me a very uniform mesh, but it is very dense when adding subdividing. The goal of adding a new topology serves two purposes. 1. to refine the edge loops and polygon flow for animation 2. to rebuild subdivision levels.

In this video, I show an excerpt from the retopology session using modo 601′s new Topology Pen and Topo mode. My technique is to not trace out topo lines before hand. I go with what I call the “Find the Topo” method of freeform topology. I know what I need in terms of flow and supporting edge loops and I define those areas while finding solutions as I go. At this stage, I am not concerned with polycount as this topology in not my game resolution. The purpose is to better define the character’s polygon flow and allow for rebuilding subdivision levels in ZBrush.

Hope you enjoy : )

In a previous video, I showed my process for exporting a skinned character to Unity. The process involved creating bind joints, baking joints and deleting the control rig and constraints. However, you don’t actually have to do all of this to get a character out of modo 601. I use the bind joints setup to manually control what is exported to modo. In my workflow, I separate the controls from the bind joints. It might be more work in the export, but I find this gives me the most flexible and optimized rig.

I created the following video to show that modo 601 can export your rig with a simple File>export to FBX. Creating separate joints and deleting constraints is not a necessary step.

This video showcases a test rig for a leg I’ve been working on. I’ve been researching leg and foot setups for an upcoming character project. I created two Assembly rigs for knee and foot controllers. In this video, I show how I use the assemblies to quickly rig a leg.

Here’s another video on game development with modo and Unity 3D. This video covers how you can control vertex normal smoothing in modo using vertex normal maps.

In this video, I discuss the topic of setting up Game Units in modo and how scale relates between modo and Unity3D. This video further explores the concepts discussed in my GDC presentation.

Now that GDC is over and I’ve had time to recoup a bit, I wanted to share my GDC presentation that was given at Unity Developer Day on March 6th. The topic of my talk was on a modo/Unity pipeline. There was a lot to discuss and I didn’t get to cover everything in the 30 min time-slot. However, I’ve been recording some videos and will now release a “Unity/modo pipeline presentation: Special Edition” version. You can download the presentation slides in PDF format and over this week, I’ll also be uploading special edition videos that further describe the topics covered in my presentation.

GDC Presentation Slides

I had an amazing time at GDC and it was awesome to meet all of the awesome people that I talk to often but have never met in person. I am very thankful to Luxology for bringing me out to GDC and it was amazing to be apart of their demo team for the week.

One of the coolest things I saw at GDC 2012 was the latest version of Substance Designer from Allegorithic. In SD 2.5, you can now bake various maps such as ambient occlusion and curvature maps right from Designer using your mesh. Check out the following video to see it in action!

I had the honor of visiting the Allegorithmic team at GDC and demoing one of my projects at their booth. It’s always awesome when you get to meet the company behind the tools you use and find out that not only are they creating brilliant and innovative tools, but they are also very cool people and fun to hang out with as well.

Here’s another clip of me at GDC visiting the Allegorithmic booth.

Autodesk Scaleform is coming to Unity 3D and will provide an advanced and artistic workflow to producing high-end UI graphics. I’ve been very interested in Scaleform and have been eagerly awaiting Unity support. Scaleform drives the UIs seen in most AAA games and is fully-integrated into the Unreal Engine. The following video is from GDC and showcases the workflow for using Scaleform with Unity 3D.