Thread: [cgkit-user] maya cache viewer : will it work ?
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From: S. B. <sin...@gm...> - 2010-04-29 20:01:30
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Hi everyone, Just subscribe to this mailing list today, asking for an advice. I have read the good documentation and tutorials over at http://cgkit.sourceforge.net/doc2/index.html Before I jumped into cgkit much further, I would like to know whether its possible to use cgkit module as a maya file viewer. Description: >From the documentation we know we can import maya ascii file (with limitations), also from the documentation we know we can draw very easily in OpenGL. So, is it possible to read a maya ascii file, parse it into a format that viewer.py can understand (require coding obviously) , and display it roughly using viewer.py Another catch is the maya ascii file here reads of maya cache files (.mc) to get data in. (Maybe I should write maya cache viewer instead.. ?) Thanks in advance -- ------- bach ------- |
From: Matthias B. <mat...@gm...> - 2010-04-29 22:26:47
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Hi, S. Bachtiar wrote: > So, is it possible to read a maya ascii file, parse it into a format > that viewer.py can understand (require coding obviously) > , and display it roughly using viewer.py Well, that depends on what you expect to see. For example, if you create a camera, a poly mesh, delete the history on the mesh and save that to a Maya ASCII file, then you should be able to pass that file directly into viewer.py and see a quick preview of that scene. If you do the same without deleting history, you wouldn't see anything at all. This is because in that case, cgkit would have to emulate the node that creates the mesh and, of course, cgkit can't reimplement all the nodes in Maya. So far, the ma importer only recreates camera, light source and meshes. But in theory, you could extend that and read the data from whatever node you're interested, assuming you know how to process the data and how to visualize the parts you are interested in. At least, the low-level mayaascii module should allow you to get at all the data in the file. > Another catch is the maya ascii file here reads of maya cache files > (.mc) to get data in. I have never looked at cache files. Is the format documented somewhere? > (Maybe I should write maya cache viewer instead.. ?) If you want to see the cache contents then I'm afraid this is what you have to do. :) At least, there's nothing in cgkit so far that can read Maya cache files. Cheers, - Matthias - |
From: S. B. <sin...@gm...> - 2010-05-03 00:50:48
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Hi Matthias, Thanks for the reply. Just would like to say beforehand, I think this cgkit module is excellent. Great stuff. =) So far, the ma importer only recreates camera, light source and meshes. > But in theory, you could extend that and read the data from whatever > node you're interested, assuming you know how to process the data and > how to visualize the parts you are interested in. At least, the > low-level mayaascii module should allow you to get at all the data in > the file. > Tried opening the maya ascii file with viewer.py and its displaying the current meshes listed. Ignoring nodes that it doesn't understand. I'll remove all of the other unknown nodes to save viewer.py reading on those. > I have never looked at cache files. Is the format documented somewhere? > I have been reading more on this, and .mc is maya nucleus cache. There is an example on the devkit/pythonScript folder of maya installation on how to read this binary file. Other than that, I don't think its documented well. If you want to see the cache contents then I'm afraid this is what you > have to do. :) At least, there's nothing in cgkit so far that can read > Maya cache files. > These are the steps that im going to try: - open up the maya file. - import the latest cache file - merge the cache file with the maya file. - remove unknown nodes, and meshes history. - save maya file. - open maya ascii file with viewer.py Will see how it goes. Thanks muchly. -- ------- bach ------- |
From: Matthias B. <mat...@gm...> - 2010-05-13 23:18:38
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S. Bachtiar wrote: > Reading up on mayabinary module doc page, so > the module gave me the ability to read the binary file. (IFF) > So that I just have to parse what's given to me, and decode it. > Correct ? Yes, exactly. But as I said earlier, right now the module would not parse the file because it's not a Maya scene file, so for the time being you would have to disable that test (just follow the traceback you get to find the line in the code). > well, at this stage, I would be happy just to view the mesh state > while the simulation is running. > Because everyone likes to peek at their cake while its baking. =) > > Plus, I realise that python won't be ideal for animation scrubbing > process. Yes, this might need something in C/C++ that does the mesh processing and I'm afraid this needs to be some custom code. But I haven't looked at the exact layout of the cache file. If the data is in a format that's more or less ready for OpenGL, then it might be possible to get something done using ctypes (but I doubt this will be the case). Cheers, - Matthias - |