I’m wondering if any ‘studio’ has written custom plugins to implement this, or extend even xRefs.
Obviously I understand if people cant go too far into it, for the usual reasons. I’m just looking to see if it’s possible, if it’s ever been attempted and if so how successful?
I’m sick of the lack of this feature.
Andy.
Lots of people do it - you basically create a system that links something in the scene (a locator, etc) to an external file name. At file open time you import the other file, do stuff to it (eg, collapse meshes, delete history, etc). Then duplicate it around as instances to all of the locators. At save time strip out the geometry and keep the locators.
The benefit is that you know exactly how it works. The drawback is it is a big critical system you’re re-implementing. It’s more about detail work than genius - it’s not too hard – but if you go this route you’re making a lot of mission-critical stuff dependent on MXS so you need to put in the time to make things bulletproof
Yea that would work for mesh stuff. I was thinking of trying to go though maxscript for something more animation oriented. Essentially I was thinking of having a link to a ‘rig’ file somewhere in each max animation file, and on file open the animation, fore each rig, would be saved out as a clip, the latest rig(s) are always merged in, and the animation reloaded back in… something along those simplistic lines. Of course the animation would get busted if a node’s orientation has changed or what not - same as Maya referencing. However this would fix small updates like mesh and skinning changes and ancillary bones added. I’m doing wwwaaaayyyyy to much file batching at the moment for this type of stuff.
As you say though this is something that would be a cornerstone of the pipeline. It does need to be bullet proof, and lots of headaches would I’m sure ensue.
Thanks for the input.
You might find the following thread to be of some use (particularly Randall Hess’s post).
http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?3515-max-Should-we-use-xRef-Objects&highlight=xref
There’s a reason animation referencing doesn’t work too well even in the main packages: it’s hard to do right. Recreating a rig from scratch on an asset that may have changed is a non-trivial task - and you will have to look at every aspect of the whole thing to decide ‘how to do i reinterpret this if something changes’ – for example, you might get a version of the model where the default pose is different - can your IK handles go to the same places? If not, where do they go? etc.
Alas, it’s not a solved problem even for the Big Kids.
Oh I agree, it’s a massive complex problem to tackle, and the reason I posed the question.
I’m not however looking to re-interpret the data (That would be freakin awesome if possible… man, imagine pipleine that handled that!). Realistically I’d be happy to get to a system akin to Maya referencing [obviously not an easy task]. I’m pretty sure Maya referencing doesn’t check or attempt to process anything. As I’m sure you know, it will just import/reload-reference. If you’ve changed something, in the master file, that affects animated nodes in an unwanted way, tough luck. You then have to do post animation fixes. It does however take care of a ton of cosmetic or under the hood stuff.
Agreed something major like a default pose change, proportion change, naming change or node space change can be a nightmare to deal with. However Maya referencing doesn’t fix this for you either, you still need to manage the changes propagated.
This may not be possible in max, but with the lack of this feature, for so long, I guessed someone has had to try a decent workaround. Looks like Erics post has pointed me in a good direction.