Multipart - Actor: possible to combine no geoms at all?

Scripting Issues
1

Hi,

I have a question regarding multipart characters: I’m working on a configurable character system where I want to be able to change textures on geometryparts or geometryparts alltogether.

So, when the artist creates a character in the modelling package (we use Maya, btw) he creates a bunch of seperate geometries with speaking names, such as “Legs”, “Body”, “Head” and so on.

The artist is well-trained and well-behaving, so I know that each distinct geometry in the source model makes sense and should be kept seperate, even when the model is turned into an Actor.

I also understand, that I can achieve this by using the egg-optchar tool with the -flag option, so I’m doing something like:

egg-optchar -inplace -flag Legs=Legs -flag Body=Body -flag Head=Head ...

And it all works fine.
So here’s my problem:

I want to give the Artist total freedom, and thus don’t know the geometrynames a-priori. The artist might come up with new, unplanned bodyparts such as “Beard”, “Eyes”, “LeftUpperArm”, “Shoulders”, etc.
So whenever I get a new model from the Artist, I need to first find out the names of all GeomNodes, so I can feed them to egg-optchar.

Is there an easy, built-in way for doing this?

I have a workaround, but I don’t like it:

  1. I first export the geometry as a Model (maya2egg -a none …), so that the geometries won’t get combined
  2. I then load the model, and analyze the subtree to find all geomnames
  3. Export the model a second time, this time as Actor (maya2egg -a model …)
  4. Now I have the info to run "egg-optchar -inplace <long list of -flag options>

I’m not happy because I need to export everything twice. Is there a better way to achieve this?

Other ideas I had:
*) export once, as actor, and then parse the egg file. Alas, there are the egg parser classes in python, but I don’t know how to use them
*) change egg-optchar to take a new option, something like -flagall which would keep all geometries similar to the -keepall option keeping all joints

So if anyone has a great idea, please let me know…

Cheers,

Erik

2

I don’t have Maya, and I never used it before. So sorry if this might be nonsense. But I think there are only two ways:

Idea A:
If I am right the Maya exporters are written in a Maya scripting language (mel???), so it should be able to modify them. Analyze the model inside the exporter and let the exporter create either (1) a .bat file (or shell script) that calls egg-optchar with the right parameters, or (2) executes egg-optchar directly. Something like os.system( ) in Python.

Idea B:
Use your walkaround and pack it up into a small Python script. That is load the original .egg file, walk the geom tree, create the right command line and execute it for example with os.system( line ).

enn0x

3

I’m exactly doing what you suggest as solution “B”.
So everything is automated and works. It still just bothers me to export the model twice.

Hm…

4

Try:

egg-optchar -flag "*"

David

5

Hi David,

Sorry, -flag * didn’t work… it just renamed the root node to ‘*’…

I guess I’ll stick with my two-pass solution for now…

Erik

6

Whoops, that’s a bug. That was always intended to be the meaning of -flag “*”. I just checked in a fix, so future releases at least will do this correctly.

David

7

[x] Check!

After recompiling the latest sources, -flag * works! All geometries are left alone, nothing is merged

Thanks David!

8

Erik - would you like me to merge this bugfix into 1.4.1, or does it not matter to you?

9

May i ask for your to include it, because it’s a problem i’ll meet in the upcoming 2 or 3 weeks…

(A Selfish ashamed Manakel)

10

Hi Josh,

yes, please include it…

btw, how do you decide what goes into 1.4.1 and what not? I always thought at some point the head revision becomes 1.4.1… or did you already branch off?

Cheers,

Erik