Mothhead – Behind The Scenes

Mothhead is an interactive art demo for Unity we did at Massive Black.  The characters are inspired from sculptures created by Pete König during his time at studio that I originally rigged as part of an art test. In the past during company downtime, we revisited Mothhead often to experiment with different directions to possibly take the IP; such as the renders seen in the Massive Black Vol 1 art book. Unity stood out as fresh opportunity; we had experience with it from previous projects with Emotiv and the editor is user-friendly enough for artists to prototype ideas.

Among the challenges of this project was rebooting those legacy rigs for use in the Unity game engine as well as putting together a pipeline to manage assets. Fortunately, Unity is pretty flexible when it comes to importing maya rigs, so rig updates were very minimal and we were able to re-use a lot of old animations we created for the characters. Mothhead was the first project where we incorporated a version control system to help us manage assets and collaborate. I trained our artists and animators in the use of Subversion (SVN) based off my experience using it for personal projects. To better integrate SVN to our workflows, I also wrote some wrapper tools to access important operations within Maya (python) and Unity (C#).

UI of an earlier version of the Unity exporter I created for Mothhead