I’m currently setting up some characters for export into the panda engine and had parented shape nodes to the joints in order to make selections with nurb curves rather than the joint…is there any way of stripping out those nodes (the xxxShape node) it seems that the shape nodes interfere with the skinning and i’m trying to figure out a way of making previously set up characters easier to animate
i couldn’t debug the nurb curve issue, so to solve my problem, i’m just referencing in a model with control curves to animate with, and the one with joints for exporting.
the problem i’m having is that because the exporter has to actually save out a new maya file to the run the egg converter on, it’s taking a lot of time. I suppose I can just batch process folders to swap references though it seems like a lot of work for something that should be pretty quick.
There does also exist a plugin, which I believe you will find in the panda3d/lib directory, called libmayapview.mll.
This plugin will run pview within the Maya process, on the selected part of your model, without having to save the whole Maya file to disk first. To use it, import the plugin, and then run the mel command “pview”, to view a model without animation, or “pview -a”, to view a model with animation.
If you have troubles with libmayapview.mll, you might instead try libmayasavepview.mll, which behaves in almost exactly the same way except it saves an intermediate bam file first, and then runs pview in a separate process, instead of running it within the Maya process, which sometimes works better. (And it still doesn’t have to save the whole Maya file.)
Note that because both plugins provide conflicting definitions for the mel command “pview”, you can load one plugin or the other, but not both at the same time.
Neither plugin will actually write out an egg file, though–they’re just useful tools for quickly visualizing the results of conversion.
David