CGTalk - Reference scene?

Goon

07-30-2003, 07:18 PM

how much should referencing a scene be used? it seems useful for importing a complete character, but would it be impractical to have the character mesh, reference that to the righ scene, then have a deformers scene on top of those? Say in the event of having multiple character rigs, etc.

MasonDoran

07-31-2003, 09:09 AM

Referance scene should not interfere with any existing elements in the scene.....

Goon

07-31-2003, 06:37 PM

sorry. i was more curious about wether or not it would bring massive slowdowns in heavy scenes/or multiple layers of referencing

liquidhalf

07-31-2003, 08:41 PM

References shouldn't slow you down at all. A regular scene with 30 objects in it will behave same as a referenced scene with 30 objects in it.

Goon

07-31-2003, 09:07 PM

ok. nice

thx

MDuffy

07-31-2003, 09:14 PM

In Maya 4.5 and before, you can run into problems when you have multiple levels of nested references. Sometimes the nodes in the referenced scenes will fail to solve. For example, we had scenes where we had a character rig, and then referenced that into a scene and added a hat to the character, and then referenced the RigWithHat into the final scene for animation. Some of the point and orient constraints in the original loader would sometimes fail when we did this. I don't know if this bug has been fixed in Maya 5.0 yet, as I haven't had time to install 5.0 and test it.

If you try to put a deformer on referenced geometry, it will blow away the surfaces by default. I think you have to set the deformer to "first" in the advanced properties when you create it in order to avoid this problem, and then you can move it to the correct place in the deformer stack after you've created it.

We've also run across a problem recently where if you used the lockNode command on an object and saved it as a Maya Ascii file, you can't reference it into a scene (or can't swap references on it anyways.) Storing as a Maya Binary file and referencing it works fine though.

Just some of the things to watch out for.

Cheers,
Mike Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

mark_wilkins

07-31-2003, 09:46 PM

My understanding is that many bugs with referencing have been cleaned up in 5.0 vs. 4.5. (of course, from what I hear, 5.0 has a lot of other issues, so you may want to wait for 5.0.1.)

-- Mark

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