In-House Innovations: Developing Custom Autodesk Maya Tools for a Smoother 3D Pipeline
Creating 3D art can come with many challenges—from time-consuming tasks to technical roadblocks that slow down the process and consume hundreds of hours' worth of production time. While we consistently meet our clients' needs, we also prioritize continuous growth and innovation.
With projects like The Last of Us series, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Lords of the Fallen (2023), and the upcoming narrative-driven action adventure, Unknown 9: Awakening, we consistently review and refine our production pipelines, identifying areas for improvement.
At Secret 6, our tech team develops various custom in-house tools in Autodesk Maya that help us streamline our 3D art production pipelines and meet our client needs at a quick pace. Today, we’ll share some that significantly support our 3D pipeline.
Affix Names Tool
While our artists often prioritize capturing the desired detail and aesthetic of the asset, file naming conventions can be overlooked. This oversight extends to both the finished 3D models/prefabs and their relative materials.
To address this challenge, we developed the Affix Names tool. Its key features include:
- Automation of the renaming process for individual files
- Streamlining the application of naming conventions across projects
- Simplifies export preparations with just one click
- Reduction of chances for errors in later stages of the production pipeline
The Affix Names tool helps our teams ensure consistent and organized file management and allows our artists to focus on creativity while maintaining production efficiency.
Toggle Axis Visibility & Scene Orientation (TAVSO)
Misaligned center axes can cause significant workflow disruptions. Unfortunately, this tends to happen when transferring 3D asset files to game engines like Unreal and Unity. This forces devs and designers to return the 3D file(s) back to the artist for manual adjustments, resulting in wasted production minutes –sometimes, even hours.
To solve this issue, we’ve developed the TAVSO tool in Maya. This tool automatically sets the center axis of the 3D models in Maya when they’re transferred to game engines.
By using TAVSO, our artists get to adjust scene perspectives quickly, improve workflow efficiency, and reduce back-and-forth revisions.
Exporting FBX (eFBX) & Rig Export FBX (ReFBX) tool
Maya’s Game Exporter tool does the job when it comes to exporting your finished work but after reviewing the end of each project, we realized we could further optimize our workflow by simplifying it. Thus we developed our own exporter tools: eFBX and ReFBX.
While functional, we found that the user interface of Maya’s Game Exporter includes numerous checkboxes that required careful configuration before each export. Our custom tool simplified this interface and focused on essential options tailored for their specific use case: eFBX for 3D assets and ReFBX for 3D animation rigging. Both tools enhanced user-friendliness and reduced the learning curve for any incoming 3D artists and animators. They also helped us save time and reduce the likelihood of errors when exporting 3D assets.
Driving Innovation: Our Commitment to Efficiency and Growth
At the core of our operations lies a dedication to purposeful growth and continuous improvement, driving our efforts to continuously develop custom tools that transform time-consuming tasks into streamlined processes.
By consistently upgrading our pipelines and developing new tools, we maintain our position as trusted creative partners for 3D art production. This commitment to innovation ensures we remain efficient, adaptable, and ready to meet the unique needs of each client, and the ever-growing challenges of the game development industry.
Let’s Work Together
Ready to bring your next project to life? Get in touch with us today through our contact page, and don’t forget to follow us on our social media for the latest updates and behind-the-scenes looks at our work.
