While I was a Tech Artist at PikPok, the largest Maya tool I built was Bulk Exporter 3—a tool for bulk importing, baking, and exporting animations.

Before this tool, there was a legacy version called Bulk Exporter 2, which I took over maintaining and extending. However, I quickly discovered that a lot of my time was being wasted on unnecessary UI updates.

So, I made the decision to rebuild the tool from the ground up using Qt. I also incorporated the Qt Designer into my workflow, along with a script to automatically convert the UI XML files to Python every time I tested the tool. This approach allowed for rapid iteration during development.

Here’s how the final tool turned out—it became much more intuitive for animators to use, and adding new features became much easier.

Finding Animation Clips

The most important update in Bulk Exporter 3 was the ability to search for animation clips and store notes on them. Some clips contained valuable snippets that animators often copied and reused, but tracking them down was difficult.

I added support for per-clip notes and created a dedicated window for searching clips.

To make sure the notes wouldn’t get lost, I avoided saving them in separate files or databases.

Since animation clips are essentially collections of MEL commands, I wrote a plugin that automatically appends the notes to the end of the clip file upon saving.

Instead of storing just the notes, I also saved a MEL command that would reattach the notes to the clip upon import:

evalDeferred "addAttr -sn \"nts\" -ln \"notes\" -dt \"string\" \"walk01\";setAttr -type \"string\" \"walk01.notes\" \"Lorem Ipsum\"";

The final challenge was how to search the mocap library. Having the search window read the last line of every mocap file wasn’t feasible.

To solve this, I wrote a script that trawled through all the mocap clips on the network drive and cached the results in a SQLite database.