Week 4 Progress B - Variant Swapping

As promised, I implemented variant swapping functionality. It is entirely data driven, meaning that as the user selects a piece of clothing, the tool searches the appropriate 'sourceimages' subdirectory of the Maya project and adds to the list the name of all folders that contain at least a file called DIFF_folderName.jpg, which validates them as texture options for that piece of clothing. The tool also determines how many color detail masks are stored in that folder and communicates it back to the GUI. This allows the tool to show/hide and enable/disable the color picker options depending on the number of masks available per variation.  

Some of the UI changes were made after the Usability Tests I conducted earlier today, where I found that a majority of the users had trouble understanding how the colors worked, because I was only disabling them at the time when the active variant did not support them, but the graying out was not very effective to communicate that they were no longer functional. The thing that worried me the most was the fact that the navigation was not clear, and users would normally tweak the parameters on the first screen and then hit the 'Export' button, not realizing the existence of the tabs. For that reason I created to options to change the UI layout and they are currently being voted on by the team.

Another change that you might have noticed in the demonstration video was the addition of template saving. I am currently able to store all the attributes that define a character in a small XML file, and will soon implement the functionality for importing that information back in, so that a character design can be iterated upon.