Exporting models from Maya to Blender

Steve Schulze

I've been doing some models in Maya for a little indi title. The guy implementing the models into the game engine is working with blender. We're working diffuse only here and are having some issues with the hard edges from Maya not finding their way through to Blender.

I've done a little reading but haven't gotten an entirely clear idea of what the deal is. There's something about Blender splitting edges that I haven't been quite able to wrap my head around.

respawnrt

It's nothing that complicated.Import your obj and apply a split modifier, with split by sharp edges.That seems to work to me.It doesn't shows the hard edges by default after import, you gotta apply that mod.

Steve Schulze

That's just calculating new vertex normals inside Blender based on the angles of a mesh. What I want is to be able to bring in my model with the hard edges that I set up in Maya and have them appear in Blender.
Some of the reading I've done has suggested that this can't actually be done. Is that accurate?

respawnrt

Steve Schulze

Yep, those are my settings. With edge angle off and sharp edges on, I'm just getting the 100% smoothed or flat shaded normals that appear when you first load a model.

I only installed Blender to see if I could work out why we were having problems on the other end of the pipeline, so there's a fair possibility that I'm doing something dumb here.

respawnrt

Man this is weird, no human error like forgeting maya hard edges settings in obj ? i did try exactly now using maya 2012(student ed.) and some graphicall blender build and it works, maybe some folks may pitch in and test

Steve Schulze

Yeah, been messing around for while. The OBJs definitely have hard edges on them - I can see them if I import them back into Maya. It just seems like the edges aren't being "marked sharp" when they get into Blender.

respawnrt

Can you try a graphicall build ? http://www.graphicall.org/103 i just tested with this and works.Howerver i know some don't trust this graphicall builds etc. so it's on you.

Steve Schulze

No Difference. That's the same version I'm using, albeit mine was from the official site.

throttlekitty

Are you exporting objs from Maya with Normals or Smoothing on?

Michael Knubben

Did you set the mode's shading to smooth in the viewport's left panel? If that doesn't do it, pm me a link (dropbox will work) to your model and I'll take a look.

Steve Schulze

The model I was working on is under NDA, but I can probably knock up a quick test model that demonstrates the same issues.