Export from Maya

Mayalicious

I started learning Unity. I am following 3dmotive's intro to unity lessons. In this lessons, instructor uses .ma maya ascii files to import to unity so my question is; it is not important to use FBX when importing from Maya to Unity? or is there a difference between them? Thank you.

stabbington

Behind the scenes Unity is actually converting your Maya files to an fbx file using some Maya optimised settings. So in the end, everything functionally ends up as the same format in the editor.

There's advantages and disadvantages to using either file type;

- double clicking the mb file in the editor will load the asset straight into Maya for immediate editing, which is very handy

- however, because of the automatic conversion, you need a valid license of Maya on any machine running the project, so this can cause issues if you have other people working on your projects on other machines who don't have a copy of Maya

- fbx files can be read and loaded by any unity user, so sharing your project is far easier

- the maya conversion is also more time intensive than loading in a native fbx file

- although, by just using the maya files you avoid having to expend time manually exporting fbx files!


I prefer to keep what's in my Unity project separate from the native 3d assets, just for the sake of versioning and keeping the project clean from random autosave or pref files generated by Maya or Max. It's amazing the kind of Maya generated clutter that ends up inside Unity's project structure that doesn't need to be there. So for that at least, it's good practice to send a 'clean' fbx file every time you finish a major change into the Project structure, keeping your maya files neatly separated from live project.

For the purposes of the tutorial, Maya files should be fine but I'd vote for getting used to using the fbx exporter and its settings (a useful skill for troubleshooting assets later) and get to know what's going on under the hood a little better.

Mayalicious

stabbington thank you very much for your information. just one more question if you can answer. how will i know how many triangles should a mesh contains. i mean where will i know the limits. i am not going to work on a project so yes i am going to do personal stuff to learn unity but i want to understand poly limitations.

unit187

Mayalicious wrote: »

stabbington thank you very much for your information. just one more question if you can answer. how will i know how many triangles should a mesh contains. i mean where will i know the limits. i am not going to work on a project so yes i am going to do personal stuff to learn unity but i want to understand poly limitations.

Usually you need to ask your programmer (and sometimes level designer) to tell you those limitation. How does he know? He runs a number of tests and concludes how much geometry can your target devices handle.

Very rough estimation:
- For smartphones 500-1000 triangles per character.
- For tablets 2000-3000 triangles per character.
- For PC and consoles up to 25k triangles per character.

But keep in mind this is very rough estimation, because there are sooo many variables that can vary not only from game to game, but also many times on the same level!

Mayalicious

thanks unit187