newbie- maya export question

Pipeline
1

i apologize if this has been answered in the forums, but i haven’t found any info on this yet…

i’m setting up a character pipeline in maya and wanted to know if there was a way of exporting only the selected joints in my skeletal hierarchy, or stripping out data by a prefix. The reason for this is that I generally rig with a secondary skeleton with a lot of extra nodes that aren’t meant for exporting, but just drive the simpler skeleton. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

jeff

2

235 reads, and no answer :frowning:

ok…i’m still exploring this issue and am having a rough time finding out any guidelines for character setup for maya.

Are there tutorials for this sort of thing out there. I’ll start documenting what I find, as I’m not finding a lot of info out there, though I hate reinventing the wheel.

so, to clariify my questions.

  1. exporting from maya. what does the engine see, what does it strip out.
  2. how do you get blendShapes working in the engine.
  3. can I choose which nodes/pieces of geometry I export.
  4. can i strip out namespaces using referenced rigs.
3

There’s a utility program, egg-optchar, that does exactly that. However, the details of this program have never been documented outside the Disney VR studio (that I know of). Perhaps David could fill us in?

4

After you convert the model with maya2egg, just run it through egg-optchar. You need to convert the model file along with all of its animation files at the same time, like this:

egg-optchar -d newdir model_file.egg walk.egg run.egg jump.egg

And then you’ll find the newly optimized model_file.egg, walk.egg, run.egg, and jump.egg in the directory newdir.

egg-optchar will remove any joints that do not appear to be directly animating geometry. So you have have a joint hierarchy that includes hundreds or thousands of nodes, and if it’s not connected to your vertices, it will get stripped out.

If it happens that you have some geometry (for instance, cubes and spheres, as visible controls or whatever) that are actually attached to this joint hierarchy, but which you don’t intend to be a part of your animated model, you can either hide this geometry in Maya before you convert the egg file, or you can use the -subset option to maya2egg, which will only convert the geometry at and below a particular node.

David