Hello and introducing new plugin: Rapid Export for Maya

Tools Maya
1

Hey Guys,

I only just found out about this cool forum, so this is my first post :slight_smile:

I thought I’d start by saying that I’m a programmer from the games industry who also loves the artistic side of life. I have passion for helping artists be as effecient as possible and generally trying to improving their day :slight_smile: I like making tools!

So anyway, I’ve made a bunch of tools and we’ve put up some of them on our RenderHeadssite so you can take a look. We have 3 main Maya plugins up there:

  1. UVAutoRatio - does some handy UV tricks.
  2. Vertex Chameleon - vertex colours tools.
  3. Rapid Export for Maya (REM) - our latest plugin released just a few days ago.

Feel free to comment on any of the above tools…Or start a new thread if things get too messy in here :slight_smile:

I want to talk about our new REM plugin. This will be useful to some people and not to others - it depends on your workflow. A lot of places that I worked at had a lot of manual exporting by the artists. This was either to export the scenes for the game or console viewer, or for artists making lots of tweaks in Maya and then needing to preview the results before doing more tweaks… This way of doing things isn’t ideal but a lot of people are still doing it, so we created REM.

Basically it allows you to set up the export settings for your scene ONCE. Those settings get stored inside the .mb file. After that any artist on the team simply needs to hit the “REM export” button to preform the export. No more file browsing etc… Great for rapid iteration if you need to preview in a viewer…

That’s the basics of it. We’ve also put in a bunch of other things to make the workflow even easier still and I have a list of ideas to put in future versions. Keen to hear what people think. Again I know it’s not for everyone - but it may help some people :slight_smile:

You can check it out on the REM page, there is also a video that shows it off.

Andrew

2

I use this a lot when I do my Avatar work as it needs to export as FBX file. I hate annoying FBX export options and needless export mouse clicking. After using this tool, I just setup my scene and click to export my model then view my model in my dev kit. The settings are saved with each scene. (scene dependent) so I can setup paths unique to each maya file, which is great. Sure you can do this without the tool, but if you ask me if I rather click once or fiddle around 10 sec to export everytime then I chose a single click. :smiley: