max vray scene into maya.

[super gnu]

so, the big job im working on is being converted into a maya job. mainly due to the team available in the main office being a maya team.

i told em converting a giant arch vis scene (many sq km, hundreds and hundreds of poorly named geometry and materials, thousands of proxies) woudl be a nightmare.. but they seemed confident.


however that confidence seems to rely on me providing files they can import.. great.


ive read about the method of saving fbx and vrscene files and using the materials from the vrscene to texture the fbx... however its a 500 meg max file with tons of external assets (maps and proxies) it contains a mix of vray and standard materials (and maybe even a few hidden autodesk ones.. plenty of merging been going on)

a) i get an error when running the export to vrscene:


--type error:type conversion needs a class argument, got: #assetuser


the exporting seems to continue after this error but then grinds to a halt.


other than that, anyone got any advice?

any reason the vrscene cannot be imported into maya including the geometry, avoiding the fbx troubles that are sure to crop up.?

[vlado]

Which 3ds Max version are you using for this?

The .vrscene file format was not really designed for transporting geometry data between applications; there are a lot of issues along that road that we don't have the resources to deal with.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

its max 2012 latest version.

ive located the source of the error.. one of the many people who worked on part of this model had bitmaps assigned to materials, but without a file specified. this was crashing the vrscene exporter.


yes i appreciate the vrscene format wasnt designed for this, but then, nothing is! fbx works for geometry at a push, but there is currently no way to get vray materials and instanced proxies from max into maya apart from a load of ugly hacks.. vrscene plays a role in this! unfortunately my gentle advice that it was a world of pain to attempt was ignored, its gotta be done!

im sure its not something you particularly want to get involved in, but with vray now spanning a huge range of softwares, the need to translate scenes is becoming more necessary.

p.s. we are using the vrscene solely to bring the materials into maya.. these are then re-linked to the fbx geometry using a script.. apparently it works.

on a related note, ive noticed that exporting a large number of instances (even simple ones, 600 100 poly lamp posts for instance) takes aaages with the vrscene exporter. about 20x longer than a single collapsed mesh.

[super gnu]

to be honest even something that would bring raw collapsed editable meshes into maya with working vray compatible materials would be fine. for my purposes it barely needs to be editable (but not un-editable!) . just render right and be visible in the viewport for camera setup.