Maya Blendshapes 🎨, Unity 6 UI 🎮, Ubisoft Collapse 🎲
🎨 Tools & Tech for 3D and UI
BS Monitor: A Visual Debugger for Complex Blendshape Rigs in Maya
As his blendshape rigs scaled to hundreds of targets, Johnson Lee built BS Monitor to turn raw weight data into clear, visual feedback inside Maya. The centralized dashboard offers real-time weight syncing, one-click vertex heatmaps, solo/global visibility, and automatic filtering of inactive shapes to keep the UI clean. It’s designed to expose subtle “dirty” vertex movement and unwanted offsets in complex rigs, with a quick nod to Thomas Bittner’s Kangaroo Builder as another Maya rigging tool to try.
Reactive UIs in Unity 6: Property Bags, Bindings, and Boss Selectors
Using a boss selector mini-game as a case study, this walkthrough shows how to build reactive UIs in Unity 6 with minimal boilerplate. You’ll learn how Unity’s property bags power UI Toolkit bindings, how to wire up one-way and two-way bindings for labels and sliders, and how to define bindings directly in UI Builder. The video also demonstrates implementing change tracking interfaces on ScriptableObjects so bindings only refresh when data actually changes.
📺 Industry & Story-Driven Deep Dives
Inside Ubisoft’s Collapse: Tencent, Nepotism, and AAA Value Destruction
Ubisoft’s market cap has fallen from $16.5B to under $1B, even though its revenue only dropped about 20%. This episode dissects how bloated costs, mismanagement, and years of chasing side projects like Skull and Bones and Avatar torched billions in value. The hosts unpack the Tencent-backed Vantage Studios deal that carved out Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, leaving “old Ubisoft” holding the weak assets. It’s a blunt, highly instructive postmortem on how not to run a AAA publisher.
Designing a Bible Adventure Game: The 20-Year Journey Behind The Serpent and the Seed
Indie dev Andy Geers spent 20 years dreaming about a Bible-based game and 4.5 years actually building it. In this in-depth conversation, he breaks down how The Serpent and the Seed turns an immutable ancient text into an emotionally charged, point-and-click-style adventure. He explains why players control a bird, how themes like serpent, seed, and trees form the game’s spine, and how art, music, and clever mini-games create tension and empathy without breaking the source material.