Baking out Animated Meshes?

[keithlango]

Hey there,
I've developed something that does what you're looking for. It's a combo of MEL scripts and Max scripts that export the mesh animation data out of Maya and import it into Max. I am basically querying for the vertice world space and face construction order and writing out frame by frame OBJ files and then hooking the data up to a morph object in Max. There's a few oddities of working with it (Maya objects must be referenced, object have naming limitations, you need to have a base object already converted in Max for the thing to work, it only works with polys, there's no editing of the motion in Max, the export & import directories are hardcoded into the script, etc). I made it for my current short film project, so it's really geared towards the way I', managing my files and workflow, etc. But it's pretty stable at this point. Biggest problem for me is it's not terribly fast to export the Maya animated mesh data. If your model is heavy it swallows up the memory on export. Thankfully the import side is alot cleaner/simpler. One of my characters is 12k polys and it takes a few minutes per frame to export all the data. (I'm on an AthlonXP 1800+ with a gig-o-ram). I did run out of RAM once when i tried to export a shot that was 400 frames long. I had to slice that export up into chunks.

So it's not perfect, but it works (which is good enough since I'm not a programmer at all). Lemme know if you're interested in trying it out. If you are I'll upload the kit (with a read me on the usage) to my site by tomorrow for you to download.

-k

[DarkMantid]

Heya Keith Thanx for your reply ( Im a big fan of your work btw and I have religeously printed out and forced people here at work to read your explanation of the "pop-thru animation method :)

If you could upload those tools Id be most appreciative !



Btw if any of you other Cgtalkers have any other suggestions im still all ears !

[seb4d]

Have you tried the FBX plugin ?
Kaydara's free export/import plugin for Max, Maya and XSI.

[DarkMantid]

Ive had a brief look at Fbx .. its a great plugin and surprisingly free ! But sadly im pretty shure it tries to export the skin information and keys ( and does a sketchy job at it ) rather than bake out mesh... which to my understanding would be data heavy and un editable but predictable as all the export needs to do is snapshot the mesh in each frame, rather than worry about converting maya rigging to max rigging .. etc etc ..

[keithlango]

Originally posted by DarkMantid
Heya Keith Thanx for your reply ( Im a big fan of your work btw and I have religeously printed out and forced people here at work to read your explanation of the "pop-thru animation method :)

If you could upload those tools Id be most appreciative !



Btw if any of you other Cgtalkers have any other suggestions im still all ears !

Thanks for the kind word. Glad ya like my stuff.
I've updated my website, and the Maya2Max Toolkit is up in the new Tools section.
Lemme know how it goes, and enjoy!
-k

[DarkMantid]

Thanx Keith !! will do

[MasonDoran]

doesnt the Edit/keys/Bake Simulation do this?

[kiaran]

doesnt the Edit/keys/Bake Simulation do this?

Yeah, that'll do it. Just make sure you check the 'control points' check box in the options.

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