Export Animation From Max To Maya

[josh3light]

As of right now, this is not an easy issue to solve. There are a few options though.

1. Point oven (I haven't tried this but have heard good things before) it's a commercial plugin.
http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO.htm

2. write a script to bake out all your animation and reimport it into maya. This may be difficult and unrealistic as you need to know maxscript and mel, and probably involves a lot of time, headache, and hassle. Additionally, if it's a character, the constraints and stuff would most likely work a bit differently.

3. Bring all the meshes into a single package and manually reconstruct the lost data.

4. Synchronize the cameras between max and maya using fbx, use placeholder dummies for critical points you need to match up in the animation, and composite afterward.

Can anyone more knowledgable add more solutions for us? I'm interested in solving this problem as well.

Depending on how much you need the objects to interact and what animation is on the rest of the objects, I'd choose 3 or 4. Hopefully now that Autodesk owns both Max and Maya we'll see some better data sharing solutions.

Edit: I just thought of another way that might work, it could be a long shot and more trouble than its worth, but you could possibly use a skeleton exported out as fbx. This would not keep your ik info but I think your animation should be preserved. I haven't tried this though. Look into information about the motion builder pipeline. You could perhaps use the same technique for transfer between max and maya.

[Donsam]

Thanks for your input Josh! Ill try those out.
Meanwhile hoping to get some more effective feedback on this one.

[Donsam]

Thanks Josh.I did try to export through fbx format earlier.
what happens is, the IK info is lost. and the animation is Jittery.

[ffourier]

I'm also curently looking for a solution. I need to export a model in FLT (openflight format for real time) and it does not support bones animation. So it will be usefull to have something allowing to put the animation bones on the mesh. There some scripts but they seems not working with max 8... Or there is no trial version...

[Donsam]

I think Ive found a solution to this one, I used collada as the middle ware and it seems to
work!! Ive got to do some more research on this thou.
Most of the other plugins/software/ including the fbx exporter bake the information.
Has any one tried Collada before?

[eek]

I dont know if tangents would come through accurately enough from max, i.e bezier keys. But frame-by-frame would. Clean up would be your only issue. Messiah can plug into both, which could be a middle ground solution.

Collada is just a universal (supposidly) XML, file format parser. Theres a lot of baggage that comes with it - that in essence if you wrote your own would be a lot cleaner.

[Donsam]

Charles,Thanks for the insight provided.

Meanwhile I would prefer to check on Messiah as well,, Umnn,, Is it possible to lay our hands on
some demo version to check out possibilites ?

[eek]

Charles,Thanks for the insight provided.

Meanwhile I would prefer to check on Messiah as well,, Umnn,, Is it possible to lay our hands on
some demo version to check out possibilites ?

here you go: http://www.projectmessiah.com/x4/vids/Using_messiah_As_A_Plugin.wmv

if you go with this you may have to 'piggy-back' a messiah rig onto the max rig. Bring it into messiah> then maya. Then piggy-back the maya rig onto messiah's.

[Donsam]

A million thanks for promptly providing the link.

I shall check on this and revert back..Thanks again.

[Buexe]

I used polytrans to export character studio mocap to a maya custom rig.
Had to fiddle around with the settings, but basically it works.

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