Maya Flower Making Tool

A friend of mine was working on making flowers for a modeling project, and she mentioned that she was having a tough time trying to use MASH to place flower petals to create a flower. MASH wasn’t giving her the finer control she needed over placing and scaling petals to make convincing flower. This seemed like a challenge that a small custom tool could really help streamline, so I made a tool she could use to more easily make flowers!

This was my first time writing a Maya tool, and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to whip up a functioning tool in only a night! The tool certainly has plenty of room for improvement (for starters, I’m planning adding some controls to add a bit more variation for more realistic flowers), but I was pleased that I got a solid first pass up and running so quickly. I’m excited to see that my general programming and graphics background is enabling me to dive into new pipelines pretty easily. 

I also really enjoyed getting the chance to make a tool that solved a real user problem. Many of my tools are passion projects that I’m only building for imaginary teams of artists, so it was extremely rewarding to make a tool that could actually help out a friend!

I also found that having a real user for my tool brought issues to my attention that I might not have considered otherwise. For example, when I first sent her the tool, it seemed to not work for her despite working for me. It turns out, it was functioning differently because we had different up-axis settings. I then modified the tool to automatically adapt to the user’s up-axis settings, but I likely wouldn’t have ever realized that issue without having a user test my tool. I found that developing real tools that actually get used by artists is both far more rewarding and informative than developing for a hypothetical audience, and I’ll definitely be seeking out more opportunities to do so in the future!