I have a complex vehicle which is animated in Maya and needs to be exported to Softimage for shading and rendering. I am using Crate for export and import, having a shaded Master model in Softimage and attaching animation only to the existing geometry. There are some snags though, and the Crate documenTation is kind of slim on this, so I thought I would ask the Alembic savvy people here.
The model is rigged so rigid geometry is constrained to a hierarchial rig which is then animated. Hierarchial meaning for instance a crane arm with several hinged parts. There are deformed tubes which are part of the crane arm, so eventually I need pointcache as well as SRT exported. When I use the built in Maya alembic exporter I get almost all of the animation, but it seems certain constraints are nok baked and exported, plus a few parts jump to wrong positions where identically named parts (with individual numbering) are positioned. Using Crate I can export the geometry with animation and import the whole thing fine, but when I try attaching the same file animation to existing geometry (the shaded master model) I only get the top hierarchy controllers SRT. The naming is identical and I strip Maya namespaces, so that should not be a factor. How do you guys manage a Crate workflow similar to this and are there any particular pitfalls, or do's and don'ts? Specifically I fail to find the various export options comprehensively documented, so it is a bit unclear how to be sure to export pointcache for deformed objects and SRT for rigid ones. Any insight in this wil be much appreciated - thanks! Cheers Morten
