I’m having some problems with fitting blender into an existing pipeline, mainly the problems with nonstandard unit settings, is there any way to set up the units in blender to better coexist with max/maya or mudbox ?
it almost always ends up way too small in both cases, where I have to scale it up in the end, and in all cases I end up with headaches and lost time trying to make the stuff align up properly.
Exactly what are you doing? Are you pulling models into Blender, tweaking, then exporting?
If I knew more about what exactly you’re doing, I could probably give some suggestions.
Ok, just some notes off the top of my head. A lot of the responsibility for compatibility lies in the application that imports your blender models (you do mean models?). When blender exports to obj format the units are kept intact so that when you import they are already scaled. If the models you import are 10 times too small it’s because the application that you’ve imprted with has scaled the imported model down; or vice versa. Blenders units are arbitrary. If you want a unit to represent a meter than there you are. If you export a 10 meter sphere into mudbox and it shows up as 100 meters than you’ll need to keep that in mind when you’re in blender and compensate accordingly. Unless you can compensate in mudbox? Generally speaking I find I have to move the decimal place one digit when bringing geometry from blender. Ideasman’s scripts have the ability to scale on import (to blender) but the obj export script leaves that task to the recieving application so you’ll have to model at the scale your environment is happy with.
Reason for this is because of the way Silicon Graphics decided to implement their units.
Anyway, my experiences.
well as far as i know the import export between 3ds lightwave and blender are 1:1 in units… so it works fine
doing lots of normalmap related gamework, which blender wasn’t exactly built to handle except in small pieces, but thats another story :),
I’m just running into differences in scales and such, and in mudbox I’m not sure if I can set the scale to what I want, and I do not want to scale my objects in blender to epic proportions to make it fit with the other tools.
Which format are you using? 3DS is from Autocad and a similar mindset as Silicon Graphics. LWO might work for scaling but does LWO maintain UV’s? That little beep you get when you export to lightwave, that brings back the memories.
You could just buy a real converter.