So, we are dealing with a game engine where 1 Maya unit (cm) == 3.25 game units. Ideally, we’d like to change Maya up so that 1 Maya unit == 1 game unit. This would mean having some kind of arbitrary unit of size. At the very least, we’d like the grid to be on 3.25 unit spacing.
Anybody have hints on how to get there? I’m not seeing any easy way at first glance.
Historically, Maya and its related plugins have had a very hard time dealing with units other that 1cm. (Max BTW seems to have this nailed) My suggestion is that in order to avoid future grief, you leave the units at cm and pretend that they are something else if needed. Your engine is obviously dealing in feet, though it’s conversion is a bit off. Craptastic. I would fix the engine, or if that is too hard, fix the Maya exporter to get the numbers correct. If that fails, perhaps you could create a pre-export script that runs a scale operation on the scene, though if you’re dealing with complex hierarchies, IK, etc, you are pretty much SOL there too.
good luck,
Brett
Yeah the post export scale was my fallback. We have hooks in to do that, but since we’re inheriting a ton of existing assets at the old scale, the thought of doing that scares me bigtime. Apparently this isn’t something that bothered the other developer.
Yeah… I say let the export process deal with the scale issue. better that then mess with Maya Units…
Yes max seem to deal with units with out problem but there are some gotchas there as well…just fewer most of the time.
If you have a mix of new and old assets I would look at batch processing them all and either flagging or storing the export setting and saving back out the maya file so that you know all of them have been taged to export correctly and you don’t end up scaling something new wrong/ or so you don’t forget to deal with post scale on the ones that need it.
Not ideal but workable,
Brad