Why MayaLT?

I learned a lot of 3d modelling skills through the use of Maya. It was wonderful to discover that Autodesk was releasing a pared down version of Maya for indie-game developers. After all, we don't really need all the water simulation, beautiful rendering tools, etc, that the full version of Maya has; and so the fact that MayaLT has so many of the useful features that I need as a game designer, and has taken out so many of the other features that are needed to create $100 million films, Give Up Games was able to buy a license for very little money, and use it to create The Elf Who Killed Christmas.

As we discussed earlier with a previous blogpost, all the characters (and everything else in the game) were created using MayaLT's modelling toolset, including smoothing, extruding, and insert edge loop tool.

For UV editing, MayaLT's toolset was also super easy. in a previous blogpost, we discussed our texture methodology, and this really simplified the UV editing that we needed. All that what required was getting a quick one-click planar UV editing shot, separating out all the different parts of the body, and positioning them on in the texture image.

MayaLT was also a great help when working with animation. Give Up Games has been using a motion capture system (mocap) for a long time. One thing we learned is that in the Give Up Game Engine, all of the keyframes that were assigned using mocap technology was very expensive in terms of the processor power in running the video game. For example, using MayaLT's graph editor, we had to alter the animation curves from each of the rotations of each bone. Here is just one example of that:

All of those crazy keyframes (the black dots) at each of a thousand frames of the animation, for each of three rotation axes, for each bone in the skeleton.... well those add up, and end up using a lot of processor power!

Not only that, but you can see where there are weird spikes in the mocap data that don't make sense. Well, MayaLT's graph editor allowed me to easily go in there, and delete all of the superfluous keyframes, and save a whole lot of processing power for the game.

In addition to the three toolsets described above (modelling, UV, and animation), there are lots of other tangible areas that MayaLT helped with, including exporting to FBX files that our engine could read.

However, there was very important intangibles that MayaLT contributed to Give Up Games. Because of the inexpensive yearly subscription price that we invested, we knew that we were using world-class software to make our game. That brought a lot of confidence to the team. Another intangible that we appreciated was that it helped us focus and organize much better. The very fact that we invested some money into MayaLT's tools made us believe that we had to get the most out of these tools, and thus we had to schedule and organize our workflow so that we felt like we would get the biggest return on our investment. This has helped us finish The Elf Who Killed Christmas, and is helping us focus on our next multi-platform launch coming this autumn.

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