Re: [Maya2osg-users] Discussion of next changes

[Javier T. <jav...@gm...>]

  Hi J-S,

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:09 AM, Jean-Sébastien Guay
<jea...@cm...> wrote:
> I really want to avoid the artist having to add anything to the Maya
> scene that is already there... You can add generic attributes that will
> be exported, that's fine, but anything that's already in the Maya scene
> (as a normal Maya artist that doesn't even know about the exporter and
> OSG would use Maya) should be exported automatically as well. At least
> the subset that is useful for now, and that subset can be expanded later.
>
> What I meant about the bump2D node, is that all the information is
> already there in the material (as visible in the Hypershade) so why does
> the artist need to add anything at all? Plus, I'm trying to make a clear
> separation between the job of artist and the job of programmer. Adding
> custom attributes and specific information is not what an artist
> generally does, unless he falls under the description of "technical
> artist"... The artist just sets up the scene, the materials and so on to
> get the look they want. So my vision is to export all the information
> that's already there in a way that our engine can parse it later, and
> have a previewer app that is basically a stripped down version of our
> engine. Then the artist concentrates on the art, instead of doing some
> programming / configuration tasks as well (as they need to do with our
> current pipeline).

  Of course, I absolutely agree with you here. What I meant was to
modify Maya to automatically do that for the artist.

> As I said, I'm not against generic attributes, I'm against the user
> having to do extra steps to specify information that's already there.
> Even a shelf button is a step too many. Unless it's a button that does
> essentially "traverse the whole scene to create and set all generic
> attributes you need to", and in that case it could just be a set as a
> pre-export action that Peter already added support for, and why not do
> it by default then? Extra strings in the OSG objects' description list
> will not hurt anyone...

  OK. What I want to avoid is to add specific code to the C++ plug-in.
My point is that it should be instead in the Maya user custom
configuration. But if we can solve it with a pre-export action, that
is a MEL script, it is perfect!. Everybody can make its own
pre/post-export scripts without cluttering the C++ code.

  And of course, we can develop a default set of scripts or a
collection of pre-built scripts, that could match your needs and serve
as a template for anybody to add its own needs.

  Could you solve your problem with a pre-export MEL script that fills
the Maya node descriptions that will then be automatically exported to
OSG node descriptions?

> I hope we can find a way to satisfy both our visions :-)

  I'm pretty sure that we can.


  I was thinking about other specific need that I had for the exported
GLSL shaders, that I didn't want to add to the trunk (as it is not
useful for anybody other than me), and didn't want to maintain an
independent branch either. But this is a topic for another thread :)


-- 
Javier Taibo