Last year, we created the AXS Challenge Day – an opportunity for our production team to learn new skills and have creative control over a project. The challenge is less about creating polished finished products and more about having a safe space to step outside your comfort zone and take risks.
Our most recent challenge paired up our animators and developers to build Summer-inspired interactive experiences, with the end goal of developing skills and tools for navigating the often quirky Maya-Unity production pipeline and workflow.
When striving for visually stunning interactive experiences, it’s often hard to draw a line where the role of the programmer ends and the role of the artist begins. I would argue our best technical art arises from blurring this line or removing it entirely. It takes collaboration and conversation; bringing together people with diverse skill sets and experiences. And with the recent release of art and design oriented Unity features such as Shader Graph, Timeline, and Cinemachine, it’s a great time to build on those skills.
Ruth and Man-San © 2018 AXS Studio Inc.
Scope
Department Heads, Joyce Hui and Brendan Polley established a few technical constraints to help our teams establish a reasonable scope for the time allocated:
- Export into Unity, an animated 3D assets imported from Maya. It’s up to you how many assets you make but they must include at least one rigged animation and one blendshape
- Interactivity must include some control over an imported animation from Maya (eg. click to play)
- Include an animated visual effect created in Unity (eg. shader fx, particles)
- Prioritize establishing a unified look and feel
We also created a quick sketch and exemplar:
© 2018 AXS Studio Inc.
Sunny Cat (by Joyce Hui and Brendan Polley)
The teams had one day to make their own Summer experience and we were blown away by the end results.
Just Deserts (by Ruth Chang and Raheel Zubair)
© 2018 AXS Studio Inc.
Ruth Chang and Raheel Zubair made a game about a colour-changing worm on the hunt for fresh fruits. The hilarious expressions of the worm are a combination of rigged animations and blendshapes created in Maya while the burrowing displacement effect is driven by shaders in Unity. Everything from the motion of the character to the small texture details in the scene came together nicely to create a fun experience.
Beach SMatt (by Sam Holmes and Matt Ostil)
© 2018 AXS Studio Inc.
The studio is a little obsessed with Pokemon Go as is evident from Sam Holmes and Matt Ostil’s look inside a beachside Pokeball. Here, almost every part of the environment has a subtle combination of Maya and Unity-made animations to make this busy, confined space really come alive.
Sunflowers (by Stuart Jantzen, Man-San Ma and David Tran)
© 2018 AXS Studio Inc.
Stuart Jantzen, Man-San Ma, and David Tran built this wonderful sunflower simulation. The team came up with a creative solution for seamlessly transitioning between animations with different rigs and blends. Within Unity, each flower’s animation is then procedurally altered as they reach out for sunshine.
Finally, the teams met to reflect on their work, share tips and tricks, and discuss any roadblocks they hit along their journey. The challenge is over but our learning doesn’t end. Our goal was not to train our team on a technical pipeline because one perfect pipeline doesn’t exist. The diverse nature of our work requires creative problem solving, teamwork, and the ability to fail and iterate quickly.
I think we’re all eager for another challenge. What should we do? Any ideas for themes or skills to tackle?
2 Responses
Great job teams they all look amazing ?
Awesome stuff.