Re: 5.1 asset import question

Date : Tue, 04 Apr 2006 16:17:58 -0400
To : XSI(at)Softimage.COM
From : todd akita <takita(at)earthlink.net>
Subject : Re: 5.1 asset import question
I'm actually really enjoying this new Point Oven export option. Been able to move whole character skins (baked skins only and uv's, mind you) back and forth pretty easily. Even if I had the .mb export option I think I'd still prefer this because I doubt even that export would do what this is doing which is getting the animated character skins across exactly as they were in XSI.

The nice thing is that it seems to fill the biggest gaps where DotXSI seemed to fall short in terms of moving things between XSI/maya which was getting whole characters with animation across, and even when dotXSI worked "perfectly" (i.e. as much as dotXSI could) you would still have to rebuild at least a certain amount of it before you could get to work again, just by virtue of XSI being what it is and Maya being Maya. In the end it was always easier to just animate in the package that the character originated from.

Even within an XSI-only environment there're a lot of uses for point-caching. Point Oven (the one included in 5.1) has some nice options in there to offset and loop the sequences so you could do some neat things with particle/hair instancing and get some very nice performance gains by throwing away all the rigging (which can get very heavy depending on the number of instance masters you have). Also it is a nice way to do animation versioning without bothering with actionclips, name-mismatches, etc. etc. Animators can be as dirty as they wanna be. :)

The downside is you will need to buy a license for the Maya/Max/LW/Messiah side (you get plugins for all of them, I think) to either import or export MDD files, but it's a pittance by comparison. It also does transform animation, lights and camera which is cool I think.

-T

Rob Wuijster wrote:
Hi Guys,

I probably have to do a project with mixed software, meaning XSI and Maya
<shudder>

In XSI v.5.1 the website says Maya and 3DSMax "asset import", but on some
forums I've read this part was cut out just before release??

Anyone on this, people already tried importing stuff from max and maya
without problems?

cheers,

rob wuijster

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