Maya 2009: Merge from scene?

killingpeople

Hi,

3ds Max had this really useful option to merge (Maya guys should think import) single objects from a scene into another.

As far as I can tell, Maya does not allow one to merge from a scene list of a mb or ma file or whatever.

Typically what happens is when merging or importing scenes together, she will import EVERYTHING from the referred scene, into my current one. If I don't want EVERYTHING, but just a single piece of mesh in a scene, I'll have to delete all the extra crap that imported with it, or, open the referred scene, export the selected pieces I'd like into a new mb, or whatever format makes sense. And use that file to import from. This is suuuper dumb.

Does anyone know of a way to selectively merge single objects from a referred scene file, into your current working scene easily?

If not, is there a script or some other way people deal with it that I haven't mentioned.

Your help would be jizztastic.

luvuwithmouth

THNKR

This is what I do: Load reference, select object, duplicate, unload reference.

killingpeople

Cool, that seems to work out okay...

After deleting the referenced scene, the material on the duplicated objects, are no longer viewable. Iam unable to even view them in shaded mode, only wireframe.

Creating a new material in Hypersahde and applying it, solves that issue, but that is duuumb. Do you have this issue? If so, do you know how to duplicate referenced objects without breaking the materials like I've described?

Thanks for your input

MoP

I do the same as THNKR, but it's true that losing the material is a bit annoying. There doesn't seem to be a default Maya way of handling this.

It'd probably be a pretty simple script to detect the material on the current object, and then just duplicate and re-connect that to the object at the same time as duplicating the object.

The nice thing about Referencing means you don't get any random crap left around in the scene - a lot of the time when people import and delete the meshes they don't want in Maya, they end up leaving behind a bunch of other nodes from the other scene that are not shown in the scene or outliner by default, so your scene size bloats.

Whargoul

Load scene, select object, ctrl-c, load other scene, ctrl-v?

killingpeople

Whargoul, are you saying or asking? Does that actually work?

MoP

Yeah, it does work, but it prefixes everything with "pasted__" (which you can easily remove by doing Find And Replace Names in the Modify menu).

Frump

I usually also just copy and paste... It brings over materials, deformers and all that kind of stuff. Hasn't let me down so far.:)

malcolm

Some guy wrote this tool in maya on need for speed 2010 right before I quit ea so it can definately be done. It was the same as max you hit import and it popped up a list of all objects in the scene then you selected what you wanted to be imported.