Flutterby™! : Maya help

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Maya help

2006-06-16 22:01:51.935603+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

I'm writing Maya exporter, and I've come up against a roadblock. Maya has at least 941 different node types, and in a perfect world I guess we'd support them all, along with all of the additional features and rigging that popular plug-ins provide. However, the thought of writing the code to support the additional 920 or so node types along with building test cases and double checking the results isn't appealing, especially when I'm pretty sure that very few Maya modelers in the film industry have ever used the "Mountain" node (I kid you not, and, no, I don't know if it's parameterizeable into a molehill). Moreover, I'm sure that between Mel and usual plug-ins, I'd be even further from supporting what's really needed if I embarked on that path.

So what I'm looking for is a sample of how Maya models get rigged in different studios and different industries, eg: games vs film. What nodes get used, how they get used (do you ever have a hundred inputs to a PointConstraint?), how much gets kicked off into Mel or other techniques rather than being implemented inside the primary expression graph.

If you can point me towards a credible resource, or are a Maya jock who understands rigging, I'd really love to chat.

[ related topics: Games Movies Software Engineering Graphics ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2006-06-22 00:46:59.684347+00 by: baylink

My buddy Alan is not a Maya jock, but hangs with (I gather) a lot of modelers who are; I'll point him here.