Film made in Maya, want to render in Max.
polycounter lvl 7
Heya polycounters,
This past year we've been hard at work on out first short student film...
We're all Maya users, but I'm a max user, and I'm in charge of rendering.
The film is completely made in Maya, from start to... now. All the models, rigs and animations.
I'd like to take our animation files, and somehow move them to Max for lighting, rendering and shading.
Problem is, I don't have much time, and I don't want things to get too complicated.
I tried playing around with FBX and geometry caching, but nothing I've seen so far looks too promising. Things don't work well.
I'd love to hear if any of you has an idea of how to pull this off. If it's at all recommended. It'll make my life a LOT easier if I could render it in Vray for Max, instead of Maya giving my more headaches.
I have a few Maya-specific plugins on the rigs, as well as some deformers that don't work well with FBX, which is the 2 main reasons that the animations don't transfer well for me at this time.
Well, waiting for some advice...
Thanks!
This past year we've been hard at work on out first short student film...
We're all Maya users, but I'm a max user, and I'm in charge of rendering.
The film is completely made in Maya, from start to... now. All the models, rigs and animations.
I'd like to take our animation files, and somehow move them to Max for lighting, rendering and shading.
Problem is, I don't have much time, and I don't want things to get too complicated.
I tried playing around with FBX and geometry caching, but nothing I've seen so far looks too promising. Things don't work well.
I'd love to hear if any of you has an idea of how to pull this off. If it's at all recommended. It'll make my life a LOT easier if I could render it in Vray for Max, instead of Maya giving my more headaches.
I have a few Maya-specific plugins on the rigs, as well as some deformers that don't work well with FBX, which is the 2 main reasons that the animations don't transfer well for me at this time.
Well, waiting for some advice...
Thanks!
Replies
Otherwise there are also other geocache formats too. I haven't tried the maya to max workflow myself but it should be possible.
Way better than trying to export rigs.
sjk - Thanks. I tried looking into alembic cache, and couldn't find any way to do it with Maya. There's only the good old geometry cache, which works like... well, I won't dirty my mouth here. If alembic cache simply means maya's geometry cache, well, then it doesn't work well for me.
I have 2 characters in the scene, both with rigs that have plugins on them, FFD deformers, wrap deformers and all kinds of things.
The models are broken into a few pieces (a head, an outfit, hands, shoes, hair, etc), and when I try to create the cache files I go with choosing all of the different models, and I make 1 file per mesh.
I export the models using FBX or OBJ or whatever else, and then I use point cache to apply the xml files onto the models in Max.
For the most part, it works ok. But when it comes to things that have FFD deformers, for example, it all goes to hell. It won't capture it correctly for some reason.
Anyway, is there anything I can read to wrap my head around this?
And thanks again!
That's funny, I have the same feeling about Max, but I understand your feeling. I think it's way more work to switch softwares than rendering where it was done tho.
Still hoping for an easy way out though.
Alembic is not the Maya cache system which I agree isn't any use at all... Using other geo-cache formats to transfer animated geometry from one program to another is pretty common and shouldn't be that hard. I have only used alembic in Maya and I'm not sure if there's a good Max importer.
If not you can try the Point Oven cache: http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO1.5/PointOven_15.html
I have used it in one project once to get animation from Maya to Max and it worked pretty well.
Oh and almost forgot: Just use caches for moving objects, for everything else OBJs will do and FBX for the camera.
How do I access Alembic thought? it seems like I don't fully understand what you mean by it.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to setup the scenes in Maya, and see where that goes. I hope it'll be a smooth ride... Maya tends to give me a ton of trouble.