In Maya, file referencing is handled via namespace: nodes are prefixed
with a colon indicating their namespace.
For example, a node with parentNamespace:nodeName indicates that it
belongs to the parentNamespace namespace. There is no concept of
encapsulation like XSI's Model system. This is both good and bad. Good
because it lets you make a lot of edits to references that would
otherwise have been impossible in XSI (re-parenting rigs' hierarchy etc.
and having those changes not break the rig). Bad because...you never
know when a change WILL break stuff due to Maya not being able to
reconcile your edits. (It's a little complicated, so I would advise
reading up on referenceEdits and the fosterParent node in Maya.)
Edits made to references are stored in a referenceEdit node and
connected to them whenever the scene is loaded. They are equivalent to
XSI's Deltas, but have their own quirks to deal with...
Maya does not support UNC file paths afaik. Instead, if you open any .ma
file with references, you will see things like:
file -rdi 1 -ns "shark" -rfn "rig_shark_proxyRN"
"C:/Users/j.zoepfl/Desktop/goochy/production/maya/goochyMayaProject//scenes/rigs/rig_shark.ma";
the double slash before //scenes will tell Maya to use the currently
defined project location to replace everything before it. This is a
crucial detail when you send your scenes to renderfarms/run scripts/all
sorts of things, really. It's a little annoying how the namespace system
works, but as long as you're aware of it, you should be fine.
While it is possible, I would not do references-within-references. They
are extremely prone to having problems with re-connecting
referenceEdits, in my experience, especially with regards to animation.
I still haven't figured out why...
Scene Assemblies, however, are a fairly recent addition, being only
added to 2013 SAP1 and onwards. As such, they are not as widely used in
pipelines (including my current project, as I mandated that we use 2013
SP2. Welcome to fragmentation between versions ;) ) However, they
provide a quick and cheap way to handle a lot of references and their
LOD modes in your viewport, if you don't have a TD on hand to make an
alternative control to handle proxies for your referenced models. They
still use the same reference system underlying concept, however, so you
should be fully aware of how that works before you use SA features.
Obviously I will not pretend that this is the workflow used in all
studios (as far as I'm aware most game studios just use maya references
and nothing else) but maybe someone in more complicated projects can
help correct me, I'm always curious as to how pros do it as well. :D
Sorry for the long post! Tried to summarize what I've found best
workflow so far!
Yours sincerely,
Siew Yi Liang
On 3/3/2014 9:34 AM, Tim Crowson wrote:
I should add quickly that we're not jumping the gun on anything here.
We plan to stick with Soft for the foreseeable future. I'm just trying
to educate myself, and I'd rather do it sooner than later!
-Tim
On 3/3/2014 11:32 AM, Tim Crowson wrote:
So with all this jibba-jabba about R.I.P. Soft and
'Better-start-planning-to-move' language, I figured I should brush up
on the latest Maya changes to see what's new. First of all, I'm glad
to see NEX was finally integrated. That's a big deal in my book. But
I was also curious about Scene Assemblies in Maya, and the
relationships between Referenced Scenes, Assets, and Scene
Assemblies. At first glance, Scene Assemblies seem to be similar to
our Referenced Models with Resolutions. We use Referenced Models a
lot in our pipeline, and I'm curious to hear from those of you who
have been exposed to the Maya side of life 1) how can we best
translate our referenced model workflow into Maya and 2) how might we
improve upon it given the different paradigm of scene referencing?*/I
realize this is a very pipeline-specific question/*, but I'm curious
to get more down-to-earth details from guys in the trenches about the
interplay between Scene Referencing, Assets, and Scene Assemblies.
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