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See also the Toon Editor used in conjecting w/ scene rendering. |
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Overview
One of the major challenges of developing on the NGage was it's limited resolution (176x208 pixels). The NGage viewer was created to give artists a means to visualize how little or how much detail they needed in their textures, models and animations directly inside Maya. This tool left little question as to whether an initial idea was going to work before taking the task through completion.
Workflow
Artist would launch the NGage Viewer, adjust some interface options, and use default Maya camera functions to adjust their view. The NGage viewer also included additional features outlined below:
Features
- Standardized window size means accurate previsualization. Artists were able to quickly judge how sucessful an artistic idea would be without having to leave Maya's development environment.
- Collecting all related camera tasks into one centralized location made adjusting many settings a breeze and prevented other settings from being accidentally changed.
- Multiple built in bookmark presets allowed artists to make and access multiple camera angles directly in the viewing window.
- Camera was able to be locked with a single click using the interface. This prevented an artist from accidentally modifying an approved camera angle.
- Adjustable View - Toggled on allowed artists to horizontally adjust the width of the viewing window. Togged off returned the viewer to it's native resolution times the scale factor. This feature was added to the viewer for rendering panning backplates.
- Render what you see! Adjustable resolution gate was built into the interface so artists could define a render region without having to dig through Render Globals. Users could enter exact pixel resolutions manually or they could hit the "<" button to snap the resolution gate to the edges of the GUI interface.
- Viewing window was able to be proportionally scaled by changing the scale factor in the GUI. This feature was added for two reasons:
- to ease strain on the eye if you were working with a scene for a long period of time
- to allow artists to render panning backplates that would extend past the 178x208 resolution
- Any and all settings that you made to the viewing window get saved with a scene. Feel confident that the settings that came with a scene you opened were what the original artist intended.
- Upon opening a scene, if the last user had defined an NGage Viewer, a scriptJob would launch the viewer automatically for the next user to know that it had all ready been adjusted.
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