Thanks alot for putting those up Rob, ive learned alot from your site already.

If you had posted this site a little bit earlier, you would have saved me quite some time...

As I was disappointed by the lack of information for Maya Exporters, I wrote something similary (I think your's more complete though):

http://florian.loitsch.com/gpExport

have fun,

// florian

Thanks to everyone's comments over the past few months. I've been busy doing lectures on the Maya API, and have started to correlate the notes into a second online thingy....

Much of this is incomplete, but will be uploaded and updated over the next couple of months....
maya.robthebloke.org

hey rob,

the web site doesnt seem to work at all. I`m just starting getting into the api and would be fairly interested in the factfile.

thx

felix

sorry, minor protest on my part. Protest is over and it's all back to normal. If you work in education it's often the case that people overlook a lot of the hard work you actually do......

they dont overlook it, they completely ignore it!

haha. Well, i've found that they look at the end result of the students and assume they learnt it all themselves. I got quite angry when certain people i work with, suggested to one of my students, that they submit my notes and tutorials as a paper for siggraph......



It does make you wonder why you get out of bed in the morning....

yeswell nobody actualy thinks they were taught by others, while in fact they were.

hi there, looking for some documentation I went to your page, as well as to this one:

http://www.greggman.com/pages/mayastuff.htm

and then something came to my mind...

you write that it's better to get the Mesh info from the binding pose, since, sometimes tweaks are done after skinning that could be lost otherwise, are those tweaks in the history of the deformed and final mesh?

wouldn't be better to write a mel button to tweak in the unskinned mesh, instead of tweaking in the final mesh??



David C

yes they are in the history.



not necceserily it depends on what you do. Imagine your entire character bound and skinned then you notice some pert of it is slightly wonked. you move it sligfhtly and vieola a tweak after the fact in history. Now what you could do with this twak is to drive its magnitude based on bone data making it aquik and fix for badly defroming joints etc etc.



Usualy tough it better to do teweaks pirtor to bind... but not allways. And offcourse good code does account for many possible occourences. Se you cant guarantee your user hasnt doen something stupid.

how much time should it take to write an exporter for an engine native format?

I say this since It took me about two weeks (after a long time without programming) and I don't know if that's too long or just average.



David

well it realy depends a lot on how much data you need. But makeing a basic parser to read in ths skinclusters and bone deforms, polydata. textures and such takes about a workday or few. Thing is tough ive done it a few times an also im very familliar whith waht maya does.



But its realy hard to say depends a lot on how the target api/ format works too. its impossible to say.

This would've been nice to have when I was writing my Maya exporter. Does anyone know of a good resource for Maya importer information? I've built an importer that handles everything I need except for blend shape deformers, which I can't get to work. Actually, I also need to figure out skin cluster importing, although I imagine that won't be as difficult.

Your Maya Exporter Factfile is very robust. Do you have any experience with importers?

I've put a fairly complete set of notes on just about everything you need to know to write a maya exporter, and games pipeline.

The Maya Exporter Factfile

It includes full source examples as well as some fairly in-depth explanation as to what is going on.

There are also some older notes which are in the process of being replaced over summer for my students next year. I can't promise that those are 100% correct, however the may also prove to be useful....

robthebloke.org

rob