Need help about scatter from Maya to standalone

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Hi all, I have been trying to solve a problem for my scene involving instances.
For scattering hundreds of object in my scene I use Phantom Scatter, and it's great.

However, I need to place a bunch of items in a specific way, and I need to have artistic control to where they are and how are they rotated and scaled, so I need to see the actual object while I'm placing it, to make sure they are placed correctly.

So here's my question, is there a way I can use Maya to manually place my objects, and then convert the position, rotation and scale into a .csv file for Octane?

My ideal workflow would be:
- import my object in Maya
- duplicate it a bunch of times and manually place it in the scene (including scale and rotation)
- select all the objects I placed, and export them as .csv for Octane standalone.

Is that possible?

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I found this old post about the same topic: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=22612
But the linked website doesn't exist anymore

[calus]

My ideal workflow would be:
- import my object in Maya
- duplicate it a bunch of times and manually place it in the scene (including scale and rotation)
- select all the objects I placed, and export them as .csv for Octane standalone.

Is that possible?

Yes it's possible.

Here is my simple mel script to do that,
Just select the objects you want to output as octane scatter matrix and run the script.
The script prints numbers list in the script editor, just copy this list and past it directly in a scatter node in Standalone,
or paste the list in a text file with .cvs extension.

Code: Select all

{string $selection[] = `ls -sl -tr`;
int $n = 0;
string $octMatrix[] ;  
for ($transform in $selection) {
    float $matrix[] = `xform -q -ws -m $transform`;
    $octMatrix[$n] = $matrix[0]+" "+$matrix[4]+" "+$matrix[8]+" "+$matrix[12]+" "+$matrix[1]+" "+$matrix[5]+" "+$matrix[9]+" "+$matrix[13]+" "+$matrix[2]+" "+$matrix[6]+" "+$matrix[10]+" "+$matrix[14]+" ";
    $n=$n+1;
    }  
print $octMatrix;
}

EDIT: corrected a mistake in the script (forgot the world space tag in xform).

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Hi calus, thank you so much for the script, however it doesn't seem to work properly. When I paste the matrix values into the scatter node in Octane Standalone, all the objects scale and position are completely wrong... Do I need to do something special? Any idea?

[spark31]

Hi Rikk,
I think this is the script you're looking for. I use it right now with maya and the standalone while waiting for the maya plugin , works well for me!
I think I got it from you're link above.
Hope it'll help.

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Hi Rikk,
I think this is the script you're looking for. I use it right now with maya and the standalone while waiting for the maya plugin , works well for me!
I think I got it from you're link above.
Hope it'll help.

Hi spark31, how are you supposed to use it? I select my objects and run the script, but the only thing I get is a bunch of Syntax Error messages. I'm using Maya 2016.

[spark31]

I just try in maya 2016 (sp4) and it's working for me, weird.
Yes I just select some objects (works with groups too) run the scripts ("octaneInstancer;") and a menu appear with some options. click Export, save the csv file.
Let me see I can record a movie from maya maybe

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Ok, I managed to make it run, but now when I click Export I get another error "//Error: line 43: Cannot find procedure "octaneInstancerFile".
Are you sure there isn't another script called octaneInstancerFile.mel?

[spark31]

Yes sorry it's the only one I have, I don't think there is another one

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Where did you copy the mel file? In what folder?