Re: Porting to Maya

[Martin Yara]

t; wrote:

> thanks, Martin.
>
> A few follow up questions:
>
> 1. What kind of animation are you baking?  (e.g. besides transforms, what
> parameters are supported?)
>
> 2.  Vertex colors - I think Maya expects RGBA values.  If you send only
> RGB,
> then that would explain the 'rotation' of values as the Red value of the
> 2nd
> polygon node will map to the alpha channel of the first polygon node (face
> vertex) Maya is expecting.  And then ripples to all the latter nodes as
> well.
>
> 3.  UVs - what do you mean by 'merge' UVs?  You mean like 'heal' as it's
> known in Softimage?  or do you mean put all the UVs into a single texture
> projection?  Also, how do you handle the case of multiple objects sharing
> the same material, but with different UVs on their respective geometries?
> Example: 3 objects share the same material and phong shader, but the image
> node driving the ambient and diffuse ports of the phong shader references a
> different set of UV coordinates (texture projection) on each of the 3
> objectsbecause that's the only way to do it.  How do you replicate that
> setup in Maya?  Same question for materials applied to clusters which are
> shared across multiple objects.
>
> 4. Neutral Pose - what is the technical equivalent of a neutral pose in
> Maya?  Are the neutral pose issues specific to .fbx?
>
> 5.  Constraints.  What constraints do you need most (besides position,
> scale, orientation, direction, and pose)?  After rebuilding your
> constraints
> in Maya, how do you handle cases where multiple constraints applied to the
> same object affect the same attributes?  Example:  in Softimage, applying 2
> position constraints on the same object results in 2 position constraint
> operators being applied to the object.  In Maya, applying 2 point
> constraints results in one point constraint operator with 2 inputs being
> blended.  When more constraints are applied to the same object, additional
> nodes, such as a 'pairBlend' node, may be inserted to resolve the
> conflicts.
> How do you control/organize the logic of how the constraints are applied
> (e.g. what is Maya's logic for determining whether to insert a pairBlend
> node vs. plugging another object into the input of the constraint
> operator?)
>
> 6. Expressions.  How important are expressions to your needs?  What
> features
> of Softimage expressions do you need most?
>
>
> 7.  How much time does it take you to finish your work after it is imported
> into Maya from Softimage?  Minutes? Hours? Days?
>
> Matt
>
>
>
>
> Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2017 13:30:34 +0900
> From: Martin Yara <furik...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Porting to Maya
> To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List.
>
> I've been using that workflow for a few years. Softimage to Maya, Maya to
> Softimage. Mainly for character modeling and animation, shape animation.
>
> I scripted most of it. Softimage Script -> FBX -> Maya batch with a Maya
> Script. Works pretty fine, but it has to be a little customized depending
> on the project. It can be done in one click, and the part that takes the
> most time is the FBX conversion.
>
> 1. Modeling (including bones, weights, all except rig), Animation (baked
> and using 2 compatibles rigs in Softimage and Maya).
>
> 2 and 3.
> Lots of things, and I'm sure a lot of them you already know, but just in
> case:
>
> - Vertex Color. Usually if you match the FBX version to the Maya version it
> will export fine. The problem is Softimage only has FBX 2015, so exporting
> to 2016 didn't work very well sometimes.
> We were doing a Maya 2016 project and exporting to FBX caused the Vertex
> Color to be "rotated" like the old FBX UV problem. Weird enough, if I clean
> the mesh by export / importing to OBJ, copy weights from my old mesh and
> other things before exporting to FBX, it usually works fine. But even more
> weird, importing this bugged FBX into Maya, and setting the Alpha Channel
> to 1.0 fixed it. Yeah, I don't know why.
>
> - UVs. You have to rename at least your main Tex.Projection to map1 before
> exporting or it will get messy inside Maya. And merge all UVs in Maya once
> imported, because all your UVs will be separated. Selecting All UVs and
> merge them with a very low threshold value works fine.
>
> - Materials. Depending on the Maya version and how complicated your
> Materials are you will have to rebuild them. And obviously fix the texture
> paths. Delete Scene Material.
>
> - Delete Neutral Pose in Softimage before exporting or you will have an
> extra locator or bone.
>
> - Unlock Normals. When you import into Maya, the normals will be locked,
> and if you don't unlock them before doing anything in your m

Re: Porting to Maya

[Matt Lind]

thanks, Martin.

A few follow up questions:

1. What kind of animation are you baking?  (e.g. besides transforms, what 
parameters are supported?)

2.  Vertex colors - I think Maya expects RGBA values.  If you send only RGB,
then that would explain the 'rotation' of values as the Red value of the 2nd
polygon node will map to the alpha channel of the first polygon node (face
vertex) Maya is expecting.  And then ripples to all the latter nodes as
well.

3.  UVs - what do you mean by 'merge' UVs?  You mean like 'heal' as it's
known in Softimage?  or do you mean put all the UVs into a single texture
projection?  Also, how do you handle the case of multiple objects sharing
the same material, but with different UVs on their respective geometries?
Example: 3 objects share the same material and phong shader, but the image
node driving the ambient and diffuse ports of the phong shader references a
different set of UV coordinates (texture projection) on each of the 3
objectsbecause that's the only way to do it.  How do you replicate that
setup in Maya?  Same question for materials applied to clusters which are
shared across multiple objects.

4. Neutral Pose - what is the technical equivalent of a neutral pose in
Maya?  Are the neutral pose issues specific to .fbx?

5.  Constraints.  What constraints do you need most (besides position,
scale, orientation, direction, and pose)?  After rebuilding your constraints
in Maya, how do you handle cases where multiple constraints applied to the
same object affect the same attributes?  Example:  in Softimage, applying 2
position constraints on the same object results in 2 position constraint
operators being applied to the object.  In Maya, applying 2 point
constraints results in one point constraint operator with 2 inputs being
blended.  When more constraints are applied to the same object, additional
nodes, such as a 'pairBlend' node, may be inserted to resolve the conflicts.
How do you control/organize the logic of how the constraints are applied
(e.g. what is Maya's logic for determining whether to insert a pairBlend
node vs. plugging another object into the input of the constraint operator?)

6. Expressions.  How important are expressions to your needs?  What features
of Softimage expressions do you need most?


7.  How much time does it take you to finish your work after it is imported
into Maya from Softimage?  Minutes? Hours? Days?

Matt




Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2017 13:30:34 +0900
From: Martin Yara <furik...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Porting to Maya
To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List.

I've been using that workflow for a few years. Softimage to Maya, Maya to
Softimage. Mainly for character modeling and animation, shape animation.

I scripted most of it. Softimage Script -> FBX -> Maya batch with a Maya
Script. Works pretty fine, but it has to be a little customized depending
on the project. It can be done in one click, and the part that takes the
most time is the FBX conversion.

1. Modeling (including bones, weights, all except rig), Animation (baked
and using 2 compatibles rigs in Softimage and Maya).

2 and 3.
Lots of things, and I'm sure a lot of them you already know, but just in
case:

- Vertex Color. Usually if you match the FBX version to the Maya version it
will export fine. The problem is Softimage only has FBX 2015, so exporting
to 2016 didn't work very well sometimes.
We were doing a Maya 2016 project and exporting to FBX caused the Vertex
Color to be "rotated" like the old FBX UV problem. Weird enough, if I clean
the mesh by export / importing to OBJ, copy weights from my old mesh and
other things before exporting to FBX, it usually works fine. But even more
weird, importing this bugged FBX into Maya, and setting the Alpha Channel
to 1.0 fixed it. Yeah, I don't know why.

- UVs. You have to rename at least your main Tex.Projection to map1 before
exporting or it will get messy inside Maya. And merge all UVs in Maya once
imported, because all your UVs will be separated. Selecting All UVs and
merge them with a very low threshold value works fine.

- Materials. Depending on the Maya version and how complicated your
Materials are you will have to rebuild them. And obviously fix the texture
paths. Delete Scene Material.

- Delete Neutral Pose in Softimage before exporting or you will have an
extra locator or bone.

- Unlock Normals. When you import into Maya, the normals will be locked,
and if you don't unlock them before doing anything in your mesh, your
normals will get messed up pretty quickly.

- Remove Namespaces in Maya.

- Just in case, check that the weights are normalized. I don't know if that
is normal, but I had a few problems with this so I normalize everytime I
import into Maya.

- Vertices numbers are the same. So if you are using shape animation with
different objects, then it will be easily exportable with a custom script,
just write the points positions and load them in Maya without having to use
FBX ev

Re: Porting to Maya

[Martin Yara]

I've been using that workflow for a few years. Softimage to Maya, Maya to
Softimage. Mainly for character modeling and animation, shape animation.

I scripted most of it. Softimage Script -> FBX -> Maya batch with a Maya
Script. Works pretty fine, but it has to be a little customized depending
on the project. It can be done in one click, and the part that takes the
most time is the FBX conversion.

1. Modeling (including bones, weights, all except rig), Animation (baked
and using 2 compatibles rigs in Softimage and Maya).

2 and 3.
Lots of things, and I'm sure a lot of them you already know, but just in
case:

- Vertex Color. Usually if you match the FBX version to the Maya version it
will export fine. The problem is Softimage only has FBX 2015, so exporting
to 2016 didn't work very well sometimes.
We were doing a Maya 2016 project and exporting to FBX caused the Vertex
Color to be "rotated" like the old FBX UV problem. Weird enough, if I clean
the mesh by export / importing to OBJ, copy weights from my old mesh and
other things before exporting to FBX, it usually works fine. But even more
weird, importing this bugged FBX into Maya, and setting the Alpha Channel
to 1.0 fixed it. Yeah, I don't know why.

- UVs. You have to rename at least your main Tex.Projection to map1 before
exporting or it will get messy inside Maya. And merge all UVs in Maya once
imported, because all your UVs will be separated. Selecting All UVs and
merge them with a very low threshold value works fine.

- Materials. Depending on the Maya version and how complicated your
Materials are you will have to rebuild them. And obviously fix the texture
paths. Delete Scene Material.

- Delete Neutral Pose in Softimage before exporting or you will have an
extra locator or bone.

- Unlock Normals. When you import into Maya, the normals will be locked,
and if you don't unlock them before doing anything in your mesh, your
normals will get messed up pretty quickly.

- Remove Namespaces in Maya.

- Just in case, check that the weights are normalized. I don't know if that
is normal, but I had a few problems with this so I normalize everytime I
import into Maya.

- Vertices numbers are the same. So if you are using shape animation with
different objects, then it will be easily exportable with a custom script,
just write the points positions and load them in Maya without having to use
FBX everytime. I did it with JSON and OpenMaya.
The same with weights if necessary. I used Comet, and Alan Fregtman's
Softimage version. Comet script is an old mel, so it could be faster with
JSON and OpenMaya, but it works. I haven't look out how to do it with
vertex colors or UVs.

- Animation is pretty straight forward as long the objects have the same
name and don't have neutral pose. Obviously Constraints, expressions or any
deformer other than envelope won't work so you'll have to rebuild them in
Maya. I guess that could be scripted too.

- Internal triangle edges orientation change, so be sure to triangulate
before exporting if needed.

- Maya has different default frame rate values, so match frame rate, start
and end frame before importing if needed.


>From Maya to Softimage:
- Once imported into Softimage, rebuild the Envelope or any weight
operation won't work as expected. I'm not sure but something get a
different order when imported, deformers, points, I'm not sure, haven't
looked up either.

- Symmetry Template will fail if you don't rebuild your envelope. And any
script that depends on the Symmetry Template may crash Softimage if you
don't do it.

- Again just in case, I normalize the weights.

- Be sure to export with Smoothing Groups to be able to import hard edges
in Softimage.

I think that's pretty much all I do.
Hope it helps.

Martin

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 3:22 AM, Matt Lind  wrote:

> I'm curious to know how many other people are still using Softimage and
> porting their work to Maya via .fbx or another route?
>
> 1) What kind of work are you doing in this workflow?  (character rigging?
> environment modeling?  motion graphics?, ...)
>
> 2) Which features can you not get across (or not get across easily)?
>
> 3) What do you still have to do after conversion of data (repair, polish,
> cleanup, ...), and how much time does it take to do it?
>
>
> Matt
>
> PS - Please trim your responses to only carry the immediate post you are
> responding to.  For those of us on the digest form of the list, it's
> difficult to find the message in the sea of reply-included text on threads
> with long histories.
>
>
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> Softimage Mailing List.
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>
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Porting to Maya

[Matt Lind]

I'm curious to know how many other people are still using Softimage and 
porting their work to Maya via .fbx or another route?

1) What kind of work are you doing in this workflow?  (character rigging? 
environment modeling?  motion graphics?, ...)

2) Which features can you not get across (or not get across easily)?

3) What do you still have to do after conversion of data (repair, polish, 
cleanup, ...), and how much time does it take to do it?


Matt

PS - Please trim your responses to only carry the immediate post you are 
responding to.  For those of us on the digest form of the list, it's 
difficult to find the message in the sea of reply-included text on threads 
with long histories.


--
Softimage Mailing List.
To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with 
"unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.