Can Maya ever preserve edge orientation on import?

Ghogiel

No one:

Autodesk: what even are polygons?

I did a search and didn't come up with anything I was satisfied with, as they just want to figure out how to get quads through to Maya from max with FBX. But triangulation is important and packages/engines do it differently, as well as is preserving where the invisible triangles are going imo.

It's been years since max's FBX exporter has preserve invis edge orientation. It's necessary, and works fine, imports and exports in max no problem. So the data is there in the file, but Maya actually triangulates those edges if you try tick the box on export from max. Or retriangulates if you allow polygons. "Send to" just uses FBX to transfer scene data afaik. Or at least I couldn't get it to work, I can have triangulated edge orientation or retriangulated poly to what ever Maya decides to do on it's own ignoring the data that is stored in the fbx. 

What am I missing here, is there a different file format perhaps or a way to get it to work?

poopipe

There's a couple of issues at play -

1.Mayas triangulation algorithm is shit  (appears to not bother about preserving convexity and just picks the shortest edge)
And... 
2.as far as I can ascertain Maya basically knows fuck all about its meshes.  Max stores all sorts of useful information in an editable poly - maya stores a bunch of points, edges and polygons and works the rest out as it goes so the concept of preserving  invisible edge orientation is completely lost on it. 

Ghogiel

So the answer is a big fat no.

I get the feeling that USD adoption isn't going to solve Maya doing random shit on it's own unless the software can gain a few extra IQ and rethink it's spastic auto retriangulating.

poopipe

What's the actual problem? In terms of what you're actually trying to achieve

I've been forced to work with maya for many years now and while it's fundamentally a bag of shit it's rare you can't find a way around an issue 

Ghogiel

Nothing majorly important. Right now, it's just some models that I made in max that I was going to rig in maya. The hardsurface/non deforming stuff I'll collapse to tri when coming out of max and not worry about it, the organic stuff I would prefer to leave as mostly quads for rigging, but can't find a way to keep the triangulation correct. There are a bunch of concaved quads on shoulder areas etc that I remember turning so it better conformed to the high poly during the bake, but maya is giving no fucks.

I could convert my normal to object space, so as to not invalidate the normals, swallow mayas annoying triangulation on the final model. So I know there are workarounds to not fucking up completely, but what I'd really want is just to be able to go into maya with a mesh that isn't collapsed to tri, and it come out again with it's polys unmollested.

throttlekitty

In that case, you could keep your triangulated mesh on standby while you do rig work on the quad version. Copy Skin Weights can be used in world space or by UVs when you're ready to transfer and export.

Ghogiel

throttlekitty said:

In that case, you could keep your triangulated mesh on standby while you do rig work on the quad version. Copy Skin Weights can be used in world space or by UVs when you're ready to transfer and export.

yo cheers, That's a decent work around.