Opening Disney's Moana Island Scene in Maya

#1

If you haven’t heard, Disney recently released the production assets for one of the scenes from Moana for public use. You can download the 45GB file from their website. However, it’s all .json files, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to open them in Maya. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

#2

Are you sure they are all json files? I only took a quick glance, but I am pretty sure the files were alembic files. The json files are some extra scene descriptions and you may need to do your own stuff to use that.

#3

its all based on obj files and ptex… alembic for the water and animations… vdb for clouds…
and you need the json and hier files to set dress the scene…
and i see no light if you dont use xgen or any other instancer to help with that massive data…
you need to crate millions of instances and convert the data first to a renderable proxy…
and there art much renderer out there that can handle ptex…

if i would like to render the scene i would go with the pbrt file instead…
Matt did some great research in that direction…
http://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/07/08/moana-island-pbrt-1.html

http://pharr.org/matt/blog/

#4

There are obj files as well, and that works fine for the big set pieces like the beach, mountains, etc. But when it comes time to instance hundreds or even thousands of plants, I was hoping the json files would take care of that for me.

#5

Yikes. That doesn’t sound promising. But thanks for pointing me to Matt’s blog. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.

#6

Not in Maya but could give a hint how to deal with this data.

#7

thanks for the hint… interesting stuff…

#8

I hope you’re able to figure out how to get the data INto Maya! But for instancing, hundreds or thousands of objects are a piece of cake anymore. You can use MASH if you have a recent version of Maya, or if not you can use a combination of spPaint3D for hand-painting in instances (with random scale, rotation) or Environment System for Maya, which is a surface- and texture-based instancer, using particles for placement. You will have no problem doing millions or even billions of instances with EnvSys, on a modern computer;

Environment System

#9

Yes but you need an instancing tool that is able to use json files for the position… It needs to read external data… GB of souce files…

#10

Ahh, I thought the OP simply wanted to play with the assets, not recreate the original scene.

#11

The renderman user "jfong" wrote a little tool to convert the mona data.
https://github.com/levork/mis2rib

additional info

https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/

#12

BTW, he’s not just a ‘renderman user’ … he’s a senior principal engineer at DisneyPixar :slight_smile: