I am searching for a way to bring some animation from maya to Blender and I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
I’ve tried exporting from mc to pc2 in maya, but it seems I would need to create a script to export each individual
object cached to pc2 and do the same thing for blender to import these caches too… Sounds like a week of programming to get this workflow going.
Does any one know if there is a blender built for linux that supports Alembic?
Also, if there is a good option bringing these caches to Blender, what about when there is an animation revision? Does that mean that if I am rendering in Blender, I would have to assign the shaders all over again? Or is there a way to just replace the animation I’ve imported and keeping all my shading work?
Thanks for writting those tips on your blog, they were very useful.
I’ve tested the caches and they came out perfectly from maya to blender.
I will run some further tests with many objects to see the limitations.
The mdd script seems to work fine.
However, for this project in particular I believe I will need to setup a better workflow to get animation reviews. What I mean by that is: If the we decide to change the animation in Maya 20 times, we need to be able to export the same assets to Blender whithout loosing the shading work done in Blender. That requires the mdd cache to be per object.
The mdd script from maya is exporting selected objects which get combined to a single object and then cached. Importing the object in Blender comes in the same, one object. Ideally, it would be better to have individual objects cached so we can work with them separate to assign materials and do tweaks for render. I know we can assign multiple materials to an object, but that’s is not optimal when we are talking about many assets and characters in a scene.
So if there is a new animation coming from maya, we need to keep the shading work done in Blender. We just need to re-import the cache to the same objects we already have in the scene in Blender. That will require a new script to clean the animation keys and shapekeys created by the .mdd import cache script and then running the mdd script again to bring the new animation…
I guess that will take me a few weeks of scripting but should be okay.
Please let me know if you know about any other easier procedure.