limitations on the kinds of Maya scenes that can be exported

Physics APIs, Physics file formats, Maya, Max, XSI, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Blender, thinkingParticles™ and other simulation tools, exporters and importers
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podfish
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 12:38 am

limitations on the kinds of Maya scenes that can be exported

Post by podfish »

I've just tried to use Dynamica to export a few scenes and it's failed on most of them. Some of them have clearly pathological data in them, which our other exporters do handle somehow.

Is there a doc anywhere that outlines the rules? Here are my discoveries:
-- a scene with hierarchical objects won't export, even with "FreezeTransforms". The nodes need to be unparented.
-- we have non-deletable camera nodes in some of our files. These crash Dynamica.
-- we have some transforms with a y-scale of zero (???) These are on cubes that look ok, but when I freezeTransforms (setting the scale to 1) they flatten out. This happens on export also, so I assume Dynamic uses freeze-transforms as part of its own export.

So the only rule I think I need to follow is: remove all hierarchy (select -hi -all; parent -w -a;)
I guess that I could check scenes for zero scales, and delete all cameras, and report if those steps fail so the user can manually clean his file (by exporting to OBJ format and re-importing, for example).
mBakr
Posts: 53
Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 5:57 pm

Re: limitations on the kinds of Maya scenes that can be expo

Post by mBakr »

These should help:

http://bulletphysics.org/mediawiki-1.5. ... ser_manual
http://bulletphysics.org/siggraph2011/m ... ph2011.pdf

It sounds like you are attempting to add a rigid body sim to an existing scene? this is possible, but you will probably have to setup the sim, clear out all the non-sim nodes, bake the sim, and re-import it into the existing scene. Rigid body sims are often the base on which other sims and effects are added - Dynamica assumes this workflow though it can be integrated into existing scenes.
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