Mike Ton

Nintendo characters tend to emphasize shape and volume over details.  In addition to value attenuation, a complementary amount of hue shifting can really emphasize the simplicity and beauty of this style.  And the shaders I've adapted from this approach can run on a wide set of hardware from fixed pipeline mobile devices to highly programmable CGFX/HLSL environments.  Normals are fundamentally one's best friend for getting high mileage here<g>.

This tool will render each individual object in a Maya scene to a thumbnail.  Useful as a means to catalog your art assets.  Additionally it'll also generate a stickman marker to give a sense of scale to the size of each object.  

Code available at: https://github.com/miketon/Maya_Tools/tree/master/browserUtil

Here's a script to import SVG to Maya curves.  Built for a small micro-project and tested with Inkscape files.  Available at Github : https://github.com/miketon/Maya_Tools/tree/master/SVG_CurveImport 

Working on RnD at Nintendo, the kind of challenges I encountered were complex.  And it was very easy to get lost in the details and lose scope.  Organizing complex relationship with mindmaps worked for me.  

This map captures the GameCube graphic archetecture.  It was fixed-pipeline, but understanding that it had all the functionalitie's of a pixel shader(limited to one sample), one could produce some truly beautiful work.

Wrote script to rig Juggernaut and Psylocke.  Hand Animated walk cycles.  And also wrote CGFX shaders.  Fun!