User Interface
The User Interface provides functionality for users of various programs. Most programs provide sufficient functionality, but often additional custom tools need to be developed to provide greater use and/or ease.
As of Winter 2013, the two main tools BYU Animation uses for our films are Autodesk Maya and Side Effects' Houdini. This page will describe the additional functionality for the User Interface developed in our production pipeline. More to come soon.
Within Maya, the Owned production pipeline has created a number of buttons to use.
- Brent Button (Brent's face): gives you an inspirational quote from Brent. Now get back to work.
- Checkout Button (Down arrow): takes you to a list of assets that are available to checkout.
- Checkin Button (Up arrow): takes the asset that is currently checked out, saves the changes in the repository, and releases the asset for others to use.
- Discard Button (Trash can): releases the asset for others to use without saving the changes in the repository.
- Alembic Button (Alembic logo): tags object for alembic export. More on this later.
- Rollback Button (Cinammon roll?): rolls back the current asset to a previous version. More on this later.
Each film has a repository that stores all of the film's assets: geometry, textures, sounds, shots, lighting, etc. Each asset can only be