Beta 2.2 RC1: Maya exporter plugin (unofficial)

radiance · Mon May 31, 2010 5:57 pm

Hey,

Can someone get me the OBJ+MTL file zipped so i can check it ?
I'd like to see how big the curved plane is in units in the OBJ...

Radiance

Mon May 31, 2010 6:37 pm

here is it

Mon May 31, 2010 6:45 pm

The stage is ~4km wide

radiance · Mon May 31, 2010 7:25 pm

ok,

so what's the problem ?
just export to meters instead of centimeters...

Radiance

Mon May 31, 2010 7:59 pm

this was exported as meters not cm....

i have a maya scene and i scale it 100x to get the meters (coz working unit was cm) and then i exported the obj

or im doing something wrong here??

radiance · Mon May 31, 2010 8:01 pm

bazuka wrote:this was exported as meters not cm....

i have a maya scene and i scale it 100x to get the meters (coz working unit was cm) and then i exported the obj

or im doing something wrong here??

well, the precision of shooting rays is'nt accurate at that size anymore, eg you're model is likely a kilometer away from the camera.
you can change this by changing the ray-epsilon on the render kernel (make it a bit higher),
but afaik you should render try to stick to realistic dimensions in propper meter units...

Radiance

Mon May 31, 2010 9:27 pm

i agree with u about real size of obj, but that was done on 2x clicks

now i can update script with native unit size support...

Mon May 31, 2010 10:36 pm

Say one Maya unit is a meter. If you say, 1 Maya unit should be 1 cm, then you must divide it by 100.
The Maya unit is fixed, so you must convert from m to cm, not from cm to m.

face

Tue Jun 01, 2010 12:41 am

@face, Bazuka,

I am not sure about what you meant by turning in Maya from m to cm, not vice versa.

Uh...I just know my whole project is working based on centimeters in Maya,
so I would appreciate if the plugin could help convert successfully to Octane.
Change measurements within Maya I am not sure if that's going to affect some settings
in my rig, but definitely going to affect the simulation.

Do you mean for Maya users we will have to convert units from cm back to m when ready to export,
or you meant some mechanism to be designed/ taking care of in the plugin?

Thanks

Tue Jun 01, 2010 1:01 am

I agree. The scale conversion should happen outside Maya. Maya, and probably other applications that do more than just rendering (modeling, animation, various dynamic simulations) will chew up your homework if you start screwing around with units. Frankly the scale change should be done inside OCTANE. Not even by the exporter. Maybe the exporter, which is no more than a mel script that does an OBJ export, with all the limitations that it entails, can tell Octane what the user thinks the scale change should be. But scaling stuff during the (mel) export process is going to be a useless time consuming step that could be labeled as at least unprofessional and probably buggy, if it has to consider pivots that have been changed by the user, constraints, deformation orders etc. The export process is taking too long as it is since it is relying on the Maya Obj Export. Especially if we want to render an animation where the performance hit will multiply with each and every frame. For pretty stills perhaps it is ok. If that is who you want to target as customers. But for stills you can use Mental Ray with no fear of flickering etc. Offering a solution for rendering animation unbiased, flicker free, and relatively quickly is where there is a need. And it should be done in a way that you do not increase the amount of work that the user has to do already. Production schedules are getting shorter every day as it is.