The key rig system in "Way"

The game we (me, Chris, Walt, Katherine, Paulwei and Cynthia) made in ETC won the award of developer choice in IndieCade 2011 and also has been elected into IGF final list this year.
Here I'm going to show you how we make our character so simple but so vivid.

First take a look of our promotion clip (made by Chris)

WAY - IndieCade 2011 Celebration Trailer from Chris Bell on Vimeo.

So, in "Way", players have to manipulate their own character to post lots of gestures and poses to guide your partner to go through the entire game.
In order to achieve that, I design the rigging system that support both Maya animations and Unity scripts.
In this way, I can animate characters and Walt can control those predefined controllers in Unity 3D.
So, it's possible that players can manipulate their hand or head gestures while preset animations are playing.

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Maya tools I wrote in 2011

For our makers, we decide to develop our own plugin for every 3D software, so that makers can make assets easily. I start from Maya. 

There are five tools in this set. Pre-verification tool, Chain renaming tool, Joint cleaning tool, Skin weighting tool, and Symmetry modeling tool. 

This tool is the key of this plugin. It helps makers to check all kinds of rules of making wemo art assets, including static models, rigged models, and animations. It also provides the quick export settings for FBX. Makers can check everything by their own and export FBX files with correct settings. Also, the tool can check the assets in different phases. In this way, makers can avoid some mistakes. (like re-rigging, or re-skinning.)

This tool is going to help makers to name their rig, meshes, and materials to follow our naming rules. This tool can do the auto tree renaming with correct suffix which match our rules. Here is the demo movie. Try to watch in HD and full screen.  

Joint cleaning tool is the tool to help maker to build and clean their rig. The function of the tool is simple but important to a rig. The mirror joint function here is different from the one in Maya. It will delete one side of joints and mirror joints from another side. 

This tool is meant to help maker to skin their fishes in quicker way. In the list, we provide the weight table of our template models. If a maker make an asset from our template, he can easily use this tool to copy the skin weight  from the template without importing it into the scene, Also I have the internal tool to export skin weight files. The tool basically will find the closet vertex from the template to assign the skin weight to the current vertex in the mesh. We assume that makers are using the same rig with the template. However, we still offer the function of editing joint mapping.

The tool is modified from my previous modeling tool. It helps makers to do symmetric models. Also, it provides other functions to fix symmetric models. For example: in order to fix the center border, makers can use the border align tool. Also, while making a longer fish, it is always hard to select the half body. For that, I provide the selection tool to select the half body in easy way.  

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