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