Animated ORBX export slow and crashes

[Refracty]

Hi,
I am trying to export acar animation from Maya as animated ORBX scene.
Embedding the alembic in the options will crash Maya.
If I uncheck this it is starting but takes ages.
Any ideas how to speed up the export of animated ORBX files ?

[calus]

Hi,
I am trying to export acar animation from Maya as animated ORBX scene.
Embedding the alembic in the options will crash Maya.
If I uncheck this it is starting but takes ages.
Any ideas how to speed up the export of animated ORBX files ?

well the way to speed-up export is to use the embeded Alembic option,
too bad it crash for you.

You're only exporting an animated car, but with high polygon count I suppose ?

I had problem to export Instancer (instances were duplicated at each frame) or sometimes strange things with animated characters,
but I didn't have problems with simple animated proxy geometry.

Maybe you can try to export animation with maya Alembic cache and connect shaders again in standalone ...

[Refracty]

Hi Calus,
alembic export is fine but there is always the issue with the missing material pins.
Maybe you can help me.
When I set the material import behaviout to "one material per seperate object" it ends up with 100 material pins so it is no solution.
Otherwise I have only one material pin on the alembic scene node in Octane standalone.
Is there another way to preserve the material pins???
And why does it behave like that? Maya limitation?
Thanks a lot

[calus]

Hi Calus,
alembic export is fine but there is always the issue with the missing material pins.
Maybe you can help me.
When I set the material import behaviout to "one material per seperate object" it ends up with 100 material pins so it is no solution.
Otherwise I have only one material pin on the alembic scene node in Octane standalone.
Is there another way to preserve the material pins???
And why does it behave like that? Maya limitation?
Thanks a lot

Yes there's a way to get per material pin using Maya alembic!
Before exporting Alembic, in Maya you have to reapply materials to face selection (so assign material in component mode not in object mode).
And be sure to have "export face set" option enable in alembic export.

This will give you in Octane one pin for each Maya shading group.

[Refracty]

Hey Calus,
that is great. I didn't try this option out. Thank you.
Is there a script Maya function for reapplying materials by face or just some manual labour involved?
Cheers

[calus]

Is there a script Maya function for reapplying materials by face or just some manual labour involved?
Cheers

Actually there's a maya function doing just that, "cleanPerFaceAssignment" (you have to load a maya plugin "cleanPerFaceAssignment.mll").
BUT it is too clean, doesn't work for us, there is something in the manual process that we need to export faceset...

So I do it manually, it's quick: hypershade/ select object with material / CRTL+F11(convert selection to face)/assign material to selection
We could automate that but I prefer to check visually the process,
because of special cases where you have shaders already assigned to faceset and to other objects at object level,
Ctrl+F11 doesn't do a good job in this case.

Oh something important, during this process, sometimes Maya is too clever and doesn't assign a shader already assigned to the object,
so you have to assign a new shader on the face selection.

Also Octane pins will have the name of the maya shading groups, so I usually rename them in maya with something meaningful before export.

[Refracty]

Great help calus.
Thank you. I really appreciate this.