Maya Data Driven Graphics

[svenip]

have you thought of the real time author and ouput as shockwave ??? it could be your solution. because it is shockwave you can integrate it into any director application and control it completele through director. so a connection to database etc is no problem. and it's real time output through shockwave.

we did some experiments for an upcoming project with that and it works really well.

[lgomez]

That's not a bad idea. but what if I want to tie any node in maya to a data source so I can generate hi quality renders or simply generate a single data driven frame per record found in the data source?

Do you know if it's possible and how?

[svenip]

MEL - Maya embedded Laguage would be the solution. it may not be capable to get infos out of databases but from textfiles. so you can make a formatted text file out of your database with the help of sql and maybe through php. and then use the text file to get the informations out of it.

[CitizenVertex]

I don't think you want to use Maya for this. This is something you'd want to write a specific realtime 3D app for, and Shockwave isn't going to do it. What i'm getting is you want a 3D representation of Earth, and you want the surface shader to be a color coded thermal map, a very precise one. Maya cannot do this realtime, not even close, and depending on the precision required you may need a very well equipped computer to process the data. You are going to need a huge dynamic bitmap, or a procedural shader that gets updated every frame. Not to mention both Maya and Shockwave have too much overhead, and Shockwave is just slow.

You could make an animation or render images based on the data withing Maya, but realtime viewport updates aren't going to work.

[lgomez]

As far as "real-time" rendering I realize I can't use Maya but I would still like to connect to a DB. Using the intermediate txt file doesn't sound bad.

Tnx

[svenip]

so you may not have to deal with that txt file and mel if i thnk further. you could setup the maya file that it looks for specific textures and change the texture files via the db.

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