Importing multiple meshes(SMD's) with MESA

arvidburstrom

I'm struggling with what I fear is a very easy-to-fix and rudimentary problem. I've googles around and looked at puppet-masters own tutorials but regarding this they are all "to be continued".

I've set up everything and have gotten to the part where I can import a reference in MESA (Maya2014) and it builds the model fine. I can also import sequences to play the animations etc. But I can't for my life figure out how to import multiple smds.
Everytime you import with MESA it seems like it rebuilds the entire mesh thus only allowing me to work with one part at a time.

As Leelo in the fifth element would say "pliiz haalp"

Arvid

PS. I see a lot of links to very many different workflow tutorials/guides, wyk's, puppet-master's, valve's, but they all seem incomplete or out of date. (Valve has a dead link to Prall's smd importer for example)
Is there a golden guide that I'm missing that is hidden somewhere?

kite212

Sorry, not a Maya guy, so my workflow may not really help here, but I will put in my 2 cents. Does maya have an Import>merge feature, and if so will MESA work with that? My guess is no as MESA is a mel script plugin.

What is the end goal with importing multiple models? It may be something where you might have to import each model separately and save them to respective maya formats, and then merge them all into one scene. Depending on the hero there may be fbx files you can use from the technical requirements page, but it really depends on the hero as several files are really outdated.

arvidburstrom

Ah so! When importing and playing the animation sets with MESA in maya. The only models that work are the original GCFScape-extraction .smd's, when I use valve's own decompiled models that they have available, I get corrupt transformations/rotations when I import the anim-sequence.

So as a continuation: What would be the easiest way to import the pudge model and his animation sets into maya for customisation? Maybe MESA is the wrong way around the issue.

fuzzzzzz

I noticed this second topic just now, so i will answer again for people who came there from search engine.

read this post : http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1982690&postcount=10

the the SMD anim that you load with mesa, don't decompiled the animation with Crowbar, because it's bugged with animation accordingly to what the author told me.
read this articles for more details .

http://puppet-master.net/tutorials/source-engine/decompile-the-models-and-animations/