Year: 2008-2012 Employer: ESPN
Using the built-in Viz scripting language, I script my way around the limitations of Viz and make my projects and my coworkers’ projects smarter and more efficient with my custom, reusable scripts.
I also serve as a scripting mentor for my coworkers and occasionally host scripting workshops for them to learn a new scripting technique with a structured, self-paced curriculum.
Some scripting examples:
When I first learned Viz, I was disappointed there was no built-in method to animate objects through script like in Flash with its Tween Class. So, I wrote my own reusable animation-through-script script based on Robert Penner’s Flash work. Except for looping background animations, all the animations seen in my touchscreen projects use my custom tween script.
Also early on, I needed a way to delay events or calls to script functions, so I developed a reusable timer script.
Viz contains a circle-arrange plugin to arrange left-justified-only text around a circular path and a maxsize plugin to constrain text in a horizontal space. Combining the two fails to achieve the desired effect, so I developed my own reusable script that allows for circle-arranged, centered, and max-sized text.
My coworkers often import objects built in Maya or Cinema 4D into their Viz scenes and need to translate the Viz camera to match the other program’s camera. This previously involved manually creating hundreds or thousands of keyframes and painstakingly setting position and rotation values. I wrote a reusable script that imports a text file of camera data, parses the contents of the file, and dynamically creates and assigns values to keyframes in Viz. What would have taken the developer two days to complete now takes two minutes.
Roles: Viz Development & Scripting Coworker Mentoring
Software: Viz Artist
