Kieran O'Sullivan

“Did I ever tell you the definition of...

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 06:55:00 +1000

“Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?”

It’s announced! Far Cry 3 is the game I have been working on since joining Ubisoft Montreal. Check out the gameplay demo we showed at E3 2011.

Bonjour from Ubisoft Montreal

Sun, 08 May 2011 07:32:11 +1000

There’s been no updates on my blog for a while. No surprise because I’m lazy when it comes to blogging. But also in January I moved to Montreal to work as a Character TD at Ubisoft Montreal. It’s been an awesome challenge so far.

Montreal is a beautiful city, especially now it’s moving, reluctantly, into Spring, but my first Winter was exciting. Probably because I arrived half way through Winter.

The internet is faster, music is half the price on iTunes, the food is great, the coffee is good, and I can watch the American TV channels on cable. Overall pretty awesome.

This is my Technical Artist Showreel. It contains examples of...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:22:00 +1000

This is my Technical Artist Showreel.
It contains examples of rigs and tools I have created for a number of different projects. There are also some short clips from trailers of games I have worked on.
On these projects I have been a rigger, tech artist, and/or modeller.

Shot breakdown available here:
kizza.com/showreel

Optional Variables in MEL

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:59:00 +1000

My biggest problem with MEL Script is that once I’ve written a function and released it I can’t add any new variables to it. This is an issue when you’re writing rig tools that are used across multiple studios and projects, and then an animator asks for a new addition to the rig.

So late last year I had this idea. What if every function I wrote had an extra input variable, a string that could contain any optional flag, which I can use to add extra options to a procedure without breaking existing uses of it? Inside the function I could specify all my default values, that get replaced if it finds a different value in the string.

I decided that I’m not likely to ever use tilde (~) so I’m using it to identify flags. (Maya’s own functions use the minus symbol, but it’s also used for negative numeric values, so I wanted something I’d never use)

// Create Cube Function has two input strings: name, and optional flags ;

createCube( “testCube” , “~visible 0 ~scale 2” ) ;

I figured I couldn’t be the only person to think of using a string to contain multiple optional flags. After a bit of googling I found a few people talking about the same idea, and I discovered ZooTools is doing the same thing, but instead of returning a single string, it returns a string array, which is a bit nicer than the single string because you don’t have to convert it into an array afterwards. So I added that this afternoon.

Example code:

global proc string[] FlagValue ( string $flag , string $string )
{
   string $allFlags[] ;
   // find all flags in string
   int $tokens = `tokenize $string “~” $allFlags` ;
   for( $i = 0 ; $i < $tokens ; $i++ )
   {

        // find all values for each flag
        string $buffer[] = {};
        int $num = `tokenize $allFlags[$i] ” ” $buffer` ;

        // if found desired flag, spit it into an array
        if( $buffer[0] == $flag )
        {
            string $values[] ;

            for( $v = 1 ; $v < $num ; $v++ )
                {
                    $values[ size( $values ) ] = $buffer[$v] ;
                }
            print $values ;
            return $values ;
        }
   }
   return {} ;
}

global proc createCube ( string $name , string $flags )
{
   //////////////////////
   // Variables
   //////////////////////

   // defaults
   int $visible = 1 ;
   float $scale[] = { 1 , 1 , 1 } ;

   // Search $flags string for a match
   string $temp[] ;
   $temp = FlagValue( “visible” , $flags ) ; if ( size($temp) > 0 ) $visible = (int)$temp[0] ;
   $temp = FlagValue( “scale” , $flags ) ;
   if ( size($temp) > 0 ) $scale = { (float)$temp[0] , (float)$temp[1] , (float)$temp[2] } ;

   ////////////////////////
   // Create poly Cube
   ////////////////////////
   string $cube[] = `polyCube -name $name` ;
   setAttr ( $cube[0] + “.visibility” ) $visible ;
   scale -r $scale[0] $scale[1] $scale[2] $cube[0] ;
}

createCube( “testCube” , “~visible 0 ~scale 2 1 5” ) ;

"Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:27:22 +1000

““Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.””

- Albert Einstein

Stand Up, Sitting Down All Day is Bad For You

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:34:00 +1000

Stand Up, Sitting Down All Day is Bad For You:

One of my co-workers has started standing up at work, and we all look unproductive by comparison. Well, after I read this article, via Lifehacker, I decided to give it a shot. So far I like it.