GW2 @ PAX Prime 2011

The charr have fingers!! No more mitten-paws holding guns! Now every time they take a leap forward you get to see a gorgeous set of claws unfurl before them. That alone would have made this animator's heart happy, but there was so much more to be had.

Little Maya Cheaters

I've been known at my various places of employment for always looking for ways to cheat. Call it laziness if you like, but I've always believed in working smarter rather than harder. As a result, I'm frequently whipping up little scripts to speed up the workflow of my projects or to save my keyboard from repetitive use damage.

In maya there are a dozen or so core little scripts that I come back to over and over and over again. They just keep finding new ways to be useful. I've shared one or two with my co-workers and friends as the need arose, but I'd never really sat down and organized the lot of them for popular consumption.

Well, that's all changed now. They're free to download and use as you like, but please don't redistribute them.

Here's the overview of what's included:

Joints and orients and iks, oh my!

A lead rigging position in a decentralized studio means lots of emails about the proper way to do things. Here's one more I shall share with you! Kernels of wisdom about joint orientations (and how you shouldn't forget them) as well as a couple of comments on quadruped rigging.

Sylvari Week Begins!

When it comes to fashioning a fantasy character for oneself, I've always gravitated towards shape shifters and nature-born creatures. I especially have a fascination with and love for shapeshifters who would fashion their clothing, weapons, and really any required tool, from their own forms. It's not just the idea of it that intrigues me, its the visual application. How does the transition look, how does something flow from one form to another, and where does it stop?

I used to doodle shapeshifters half-way between two forms, shifted just enough to facilitate whatever new need had taken them. The efficiency of life tends to work that way, after all. Life is rather lazy when it comes right down to it, and in that laziness you can find an elegant efficiency.

Unfortunately, technical limitations usually keep that sort of cool fluidity out of our games.

Horse Color Genetics Simulator

Anyone who knows me knows that as a kid, like so many other little girls out there, I had a horse phase. Less like so many other little girls, I was also a nerd. For a good 6-10 years of my childhood I was a veritable walking encyclopedia of horses. Any time you establish a knowledge base like that it's bound to resurface time and time again. So while I wouldn't really be considered a horse nut anymore, I do have periods of indulgence where I tap back into that childhood passion and make use of the sponge that was my grade-school brain.

One such indulgence was a horse genetics simulator I made in 2007. I made it, friends laughed about Jeno and her horses again, and it slid off the radar and into the archive of "things I did" floating around the internet.

Occasionally I would get emails from a college student in equine veterinary studies thanking me for helping them get a handle on the difficult subject of coat color genetics. Other than that I didn't think much about the little page I had created.