Relationship Roster Visualizer
Designers couldn't read a three-axis relationship system off a flat chart. Built them an interactive 3D diagram inside Maya, navigable and driven by the 27-state lookup. Roughly three days of senior tech-art work, in a single evening.
The game's relationship system runs on three simultaneous axes (vibe, credit, and status) and a 27-state lookup of social attitudes. A 2D chart flattens exactly the dimensionality that makes the system interesting, so designers and stakeholders could not actually see it. What we needed was a real 3D diagram you could rotate and read. Building one from scratch in Maya is normally days or weeks of a dedicated technical artist writing procedural geometry, camera rigs, materials, 3D text, and a UI against Maya's underdocumented scripting API.
I built the tool in a single evening, working with an AI coding assistant. It generates a fully interactive 3D diagram inside Maya: a wireframe cube for the three-axis relationship space, color-coded spheres positioned by normalized coordinate sliders, Manhattan-routed connection straws from each sphere to the origin, procedural 3D polygon text labels driven by the 27-state lookup table (auto-facing the camera via aim constraints), and a custom orbital camera rig with yaw, pitch, roll, distance, and FOV. A full UI panel drives every parameter with one-click Build, Update Positions, and Update Camera buttons.
The hard part was Maya's underdocumented CreatePolygonType command for the 3D text. It kept failing, and I diagnosed the root causes (wrong node targeting, transforms lost during parenting) by reading debug output with the AI until the actual failure surfaced, then fixing it.
An AI coding assistant handled the Maya API research, node hierarchy, constraint logic, procedural geometry, material assignment, and iterative debugging. I directed it, made the design decisions, and did the diagnostic reads (like isolating why the polygon-text command silently failed) that turned a stuck script into a working tool. It let someone deep in Maya but newer to Python scripting produce a production-quality tool in one sitting.
Designers can now explore and present the 27-state social system in 3D, which improved both internal understanding and how we communicated a core mechanic externally. The session also left reusable patterns (procedural text, camera rigs, aim constraints, UI-driven scene builders) that carry to future Maya tools.
The bottleneck in AI-assisted tooling is rarely the code; it is diagnosis. Knowing that a silent Maya failure means "wrong node target," not "bad syntax," comes from years of working inside Maya. Pair that diagnosis with a model that writes code quickly, and a week of tool-building becomes an evening.