Importing animations into Maya
Speaking to other workshoppers I realized my previous thread might not have been the best approach so I'm making a new one here!
For all of you animators out there.
What do you import the .smd animations with? (Plugins, software etc)
What is your workflow for importing animations overall?
I have followed wyk's writeup, tried going with MESA etc but most of the tutorials I find only cover either pure item creation (no animation).
And if they cover animation they only cover how to create your own not importing the existing animation.
What I'm looking for is the best way to import a model and it's animation-sets into Maya in order to customize my own animation endings etc.
For all of you animators out there.
What do you import the .smd animations with? (Plugins, software etc)
What is your workflow for importing animations overall?
I have followed wyk's writeup, tried going with MESA etc but most of the tutorials I find only cover either pure item creation (no animation).
And if they cover animation they only cover how to create your own not importing the existing animation.
What I'm looking for is the best way to import a model and it's animation-sets into Maya in order to customize my own animation endings etc.
Replies
So I might be the exception, but I use fbx. I rig and animate in maya 2013,and export with fbx.
Basically the workflow is something like...
For Basemesh. Rig. Be Satisfied. Save. Select Hierarchy. Select Mesh. Export Selection. Turn off Baking. Turn on smoothing groups. Automatic scaling (1). Export.
For Animations - Animate. Be Satisified with work. Save. Select Hierarchy, bake. Reselect Hierarchy (because i'm a nut). Export Selection. Turn off all geometry options. Turn on baking options. Export.
Something like that give or take a few steps. I'm really really thinking about making a "Rigging & Animating For Dota" crash course tutorial, there seems to be a lot of question about how the processes go.
Fbx has always worked for me, but I know that a lot of people prefer SMDs. What are you using to animate?
Anyway, your best bet seems to be MESA 2. It works reasonably well, although it feels slow and hacky. See this guide: http://puppet-master.net/tutorials/source-engine/dota-2-items-creation-guide-for-maya/ on how to import. Beware of all the little caveats and steps in the description.
In Blender it's so easy that if I were you I'd consider just importing them into Blender and exporting them into a maya readable format
Ah so here's what I've been doing so far. Did the whole pipeline. So I can import models and all that.
I also know how to EXPORT my animations and stuff. But what I can't find information on is how to IMPORT the animation-sets from valve in a neat way
I'm looking to create a scene in maya and render it but I want the original cycles etc.
@Bigpet
Yeah! I thought MESA was the golden stuff. And it works! I can import one .smd and also import the sequences for it.
But MESA does not (atleast not what I've been able to find) allow you to import more then one .smd MODEL at a time.
So for example, for Pudge, I can import the basemodel (no items and no left arm) And play it's animations. But I can't import the rest of the parts. Everytime you import an .smd with MESA it rebuilds the entire scene and deletes your old one
I tried contacting the puppet-master himself via the forum but it seems like the forum is inactive.
Thanks for the replys guys! Tell me more!
Hm. I have him added on Steam, asked him, you're right it's currently not possible.
I guess you really should import them into Blender, export as fbx and import that into Maya.
@heboltz3 what's SFM? :O
You need to install this addon: http://steamreview.org/BlenderSourceTools/
After that just import all the parts one by one, they'll automatically assemble correctly.
SFM stands for Source Filmmaker and it has the newest version of the sdktools for Maya that's publicly available afaik (binary plugin only works for 32-bit Maya).
Might have to look up blender!
Arvidburstrom sorry for not responding on my forum i made a fix for you so you can import into the current scene. i know that mesa need some improvement, i would tell you that i am aware of the problem, with exporting multiple asset at the same time.
if you only need the SMD, you should investigate the Ref_break layer to export a complete set, but i am not sure how the bones will be exported.
What mesa need i a layer that include the bone to export. this will make mesa full compatible with Reference editor.
the fix :
http://puppet-master.net/mesa/MESA_2.0.1_fix_import.rar
note: just replace the smdRead.mel with that one.