Scripts/Mel Snippets:


Contour Render Script: This handy little script lets you skip all the hassle of setting maya up to do a contour render. It creates a new shader and sets your render settings automatically to allow for contour rendering. All you have to do is apply it to your model/environment and hit render!

Tail Rotation Expression Script: This simple little script makes rigging/animating anything with a tail (or similarly- whiskers, ponytails, etc) so much easier. Basically it creates a multiplier in the control that picks up all of the joints in the chain- so instead of having to rotate each individually (as you would with an fk tail), you have one control that rotates all of the joints equally.

Technical Project:

The Siggraph 2009 Research Challenge (at CDIA): This was our technical challenge for school, but it was given out at Siggraph 2009. The problem was as follows:

Choose a specific animal, or that animal's sense, and develop a system that will enable a person to experience the physical or social world as that animal does.

For my animal sense, I chose the senses that co-evolved in a predator-prey relationship. Since sensory adaptations tend to evolve out of predator-prey relationships, I felt that this fell into the parameters of the challenge. For my animals, I chose moths & bats- primarily the echolocation of bats with the sensory adaptations of moths (sonar hearing moth ears, wing vibrations, etc). I utilized the maya based programming language, mel, to create a within maya "game" (mostly involving workarounds as maya is not actually a game engine).

The game is meant to be targetting a general science public (high school level biology) and give the user both a sense of what it's like to be a bat/moth and some education into how those creatures operate. I did quite extensive research into the sensory adaptations of both echolocating bats & nocturnal moths, as well as what kind of environment they would cohabitate before creating this project.

You can either control the moth or the bat. Each creature has a unique set of goals and comes with a UI system- you can move your moth/bat respectively using translates & rotates to navigate the scene.

Watch the Demo:
(Music: Danse Macabre, by Camille Saint-Saens)

• Download the Project (Coming Soon)

Screenshots: