ColladaMaya

Product information
Name: ColladaMaya Purpose: unstated Last updated: August 3rd 2007 Current version: 3.04B Status: unstated OS: unstated Forum Report bugs Feature list Maintainer: Feeling Software Contact for technical issues:
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ColladaMaya is a COLLADA import and export Softimage plug-in for Autodesk Maya.

• Extensions: Feeling Software ColladaMax extensions

ColladaMaya 3.04B has been released.

3 August 2007 (PDT)

New features

• imports and exports non-instanced morph targets.
• imports of triangle strip and triangle fan polygons set: these will be re-exported as triangle lists.
• imports <params> in profile_COMMON material and material instances.

Please see the release note for the list of fixes.

ColladaMaya 3.03 has been released.

8 July 2007 (PDT)

We have just released build 3.03J of our COLLADA tools. Please see the updated changelog for the list of fixes.

It improves the sampling detection, better compliance with regards to standard materials, a much improved ColladaFX render node and a slew of other bug fixes. New versions of ColladaMax and FCollada were posted as well. Please read the changelog for more information. Registered users can download Feeling Software's COLLADA Tools on our website's Downloads section. Registration is free.

Please note that previous versions of Feeling Software's COLLADA tools had a compliance issue with regards to the transparency factor within standard material. This issue is now corrected, but:

Data exported with previous versions of our COLLADA tools may import with inverted transparency in ColladaMax 3.03 and ColladaMaya 3.03.

ColladaMaya 3.02 has been released.

18:18, 12 February 2007 (PDT)

It includes a bunch of bug fixes. Please read the newly merged changelog for more information. Registered users can download Feeling Software's COLLADA Tools on our website's Downloads section. Registration is free.

ColladaMaya 3.01 has been released.

18:18, 29 January 2007 (PDT)

Feeling Software is pleased to announce the latest release of its ColladaMaya translator. As always, the free version is available in the downloads section at www.feelingsoftware.com. It includes a wide range of bug fixes. Enjoy!

• 4061 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya: Some ColladaFX shader node improvements.

• 4033 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Fix from Ray Donnelly for a crash in ColladaMaya when exporting unshaded polygons.

CollasdaMaya 3.00 has been released.

• 3905 by claforte

  Fix the export of force field.

• 3852 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Also got some PREMIUM_EMITTER fixes there.

• 3848 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Added MObject pointer encapsulation on persistent DAE objects. Will need to write a more formal implementation of those. These are necessary because one import can happen in the middle of another import/export, through XRef, and there is no guarantee that MObject pointers are preserved by Maya at the end of one import/export call.

• 3841 by claforte

  With help from Guillaume, fixed the way emitters refer to force fields. Most of the time the Maya force fields will be exported as a transform containing a force field instance. This is because in Maya, force fields are derived from transforms. Added support for Air force field, which uses the same logic as for the Max wind force.

• 3749 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya (ColladaFX UI): Merged with changes 1, 3 and 4 submitted by Patrick Doane ([email protected]). Change 1: White default color for shader nodes. Change 3: Default textures using the "Resource Name" Cg annotation, without creating new plugs/attributes. Change 4: Adding automatic mipmap generation on default textures to remove artifacts on normal/specular maps. Change 2 will have to wait until the Collada Passes redesign is finished. The CFXRenderState::UnUse method has a new name: CFXRenderState::Restore.

• 3738 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya (ColladaFX UI): Added persistence for render states added directly from Maya. When saving to Maya binary, an attribute called "dynRenderStates" is created. It is a kString attribute containing the concatenated names of the render states present in the shader node separated by a space character (and thus compatible with the FUStringConversion algorithm). I know it should have been a kStringArray attribute, this way we would avoid a string split operation, but Maya's API is not so tolerant, and kStringArray attributes do not seem to export well (I get a 'file read error' on load).

• 3728 by claforte

  Support for sprite particle export. This mainly involved adding one COMMON material instance to emitter instances. Added DaeEmitter class.

• 3719 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya/ColladaMax: Fixed the skin object inter-operability between Max and Maya. Had some issues with the generation of pivot points and their usage within the plug-in.

• 3542 by claforte

  Implement export of particle speed and size.

• 3520 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya (bug 230): Fixed: The provided test file now loads correctly. Old render state attributes saved by Maya are now loaded correctly. Fixed the "forceLoad" method in CFXShaderNode to take into account the programs entry points and determine if we use Cg or CgFX by checking the extension (same heuristic as in MEL script). Fixed the import of FX nodes using the same include for vertex and fragment programs, also added correct program entry points.

• 3511 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya: Hooked render states to their UI. The communication between the Collada internal state representation and Maya's attributes is completed. It seems to work fine, but it'll need more tests. Known issue: the "optionMenuGrp" UI element is linked but unfortunately when switching from a shader node to another it selects the first sub-item instead of the one represented by the underlying attribute. This has to be fixed.

• 3462 by glaforte

  FCollada: Added FCDocumentTools namespace with one function to standardize the up_axis and the units of a document. It currently works well for geometries, controllers, scene nodes transforms. Some work left regarding the support of animation curves and removing added pivots when converting back. Fixed the import of group/pivot nodes.

• 3355 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Improved the current version of the skin-pivot export in ColladaMaya.

• 3344 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Implemented the export of empty polygons set in order to fix the material attachment on multiple geometry instances.

• 3300 by staylor

  Removed direct vector access from FCDControllerInstance TODO: Continue this change into the FCD controllers.

• 3294 by staylor

  Bug242: ColladaMaya could fail to export nodes if VisitTransform returns without creating a node. As TraversePath assumes that calling VisitTransform will create a node, it will always replace current with current->parent at the end of the function. If VisitTransform returns without creating a node, the tree unwinds too far and loses its pointer to the scene tree, preventing any further nodes from being exported. This issue has been resolved, by removing any returns from VisitTransform and changing the conditional checks for current == NULL to FUAssert, as there is no valid reason for this to be the case.

• 3291 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya: ColladaFX UI update, part 1. I made major changes in the ShaderTemplate MEL file, this file was such a mess. I removed unused and duplicated (!?) functions, and reordered the whole thing so that humans can read it. Concretely, I merged the fragment and vertex tabs into one "Shading" tab, and added entry point fields for both. The default entry points are "main" for Cg shaders, and "Vertex|Fragment Program" for CgFX effects.

• 3283 by glaforte

  FCollada: A bit of a container usage clean-up. On my own time, I'll add a fm::ptr_vector type in order to reduce the executable size of FCollada (at the cost of debug info). Right now, the library size reduction is about 18%.

• 3269 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: A bit more preservation: implemented the re-use of the normal/position/geo-tangent/geo-binormal sources in the <mesh> element.

• 3263 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Enable the first prototype of the extra/id preservation. Includes some fixes to regressions in the re-import of skins, materials and child nodes.

• 3248 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya, FCollada: Added a "right_handed" attribute to the new environment_mapping element. Tells the user which coordinate system was used when building the environment map. Useful for CUBIC mapping compatibility between Renderman and OpenGL. FViewer: Flip the cube map images when the coordinate system is left-handed. Added a bit more comments.

• 3237 by glaforte

  COLLADA Tools: Added copyright information in the files that were missing it as indicated by Ricardo's script.

• 3220 by glaforte

  FCollada: Added support for the 'type' attribute of extra, which has implications on all the tools. Completed the refactoring and addition of the cloning functions. ColladaMaya: A first, incomplete and disabled, prototype for the export of cloned imported entities in order to perserve extra and unprocessed elements.

• 3216 by staylor

  Feeling Veiwer: Contains many changes: SceneNode render is broken down to update and render loops. Every node updates every frame, but may not render. Transform Update is now a downstream process - this means that SceneNodes GET their transforms, instead of the transform objects SETting the values. GetLocalTransform should be used whenever local transform is required. A variety of optimizations have been implemented, and are conditionally compiled via a list of defines in DebugPerformance, a new class for measuring frame render times. Bounding boxes, skinning/morphing updates, vertex animations, are fixed. FRTransform resets have been eliminated. Fixed materials disabled on skins. Implemented skew matricies. Intersection tests are being moved to a seperate namespace, FRIntersect ColladaMax: Upgraded to be compatible with 3ds Max 9 Added name attribute to geometry exported from max. Recursive map export implemented, but much further work is required in this area to standardize non-blinn map export.

• 3216 by staylor

  ColladaMaya: Fixed -ve colour indices on export.

• 3202 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Fixed up the installer to correctly overwrite old MEL scripts and delete unused MEL scripts.

• 3176 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: The material library export now takes into consideration the XRef handling flags.

• 3158 by staylor

  (BUG212) Fixed naming errors on skin exports, multiple skin instance roots are now fully supported

• 3150 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: ColladaFX Render Node: Render State Support. Renamed a few of the ColladaFX render node structures in order to improve coherency and moved them in the ColladaFX files in their own folder. Added the CFXRenderState class that contains an FCDEffectPassState object to hold its render state data. Added the creation of the Maya plug for each render state and the processing of them on render/initialization/data synchronization/export. Wrote the translation of the CG states into the ColladaFX render node states. Implemented OpenGL 2.0 support in GLExt. Completed the rendering support function for all the render states. Implemented the import from ColladaFX into the ColladaFX render node of render state values.

• 3138 by glaforte

  COLLADA Tools: Fixed some ToPoint renamed to ToVector3. 3dsMax #defines NEVER in the global namespace, so #undef it before using it in our COLLADA enumerators.

• 3109 by glaforte

  Everything: All the code should now use fm::string, fm::vector and fm::map. These structures do not exist in the default namespace anymore.

• 3085 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Fixed the export of per-vertex-face color indices from the blank set in Maya 6.0.1.

• 3050 by ewhittom

  Implemented a "best effort" approach to the NURBS texture problem. Max and Maya do not seem to give a lot of importance to NURBS texture since in both documentations NURBS are viewed only as a mean of generating smooth polygon meshes. ColladaMax: I had two choices of data formats for NURBS textures: user defined (raw) and chord length parameterization (CLP) data formats, the later using the CV hull to give a better, more natural, texture coordinate information. Max does not take back its own data, despite what the documentation says. Wether I use raw or CLP format, Max screws the texture information, so I chose not to import it anymore and use the default setting. I'll contact Autodesk to see what's going on in there. The Viewer handles CLP data correctly, but Maya will not be able to import it (the rotation angle is ok, but the offsets and scales are incorrect due to CLP output). ColladaMaya: Added correct texture surface export. NURBS texture information is stored in the material's place2dTexture node. At export time, I build a default texture surface and transform it using the node's simplified rotation, translation and scale parameters.

• 3050 by ewhittom

  Since these parameters are exported as extra children in the effect's texture element, I don't need to do anything at import time if these parameters are imported as well. Still, I added some logic to get back the parameters from the texture surface if they're missing. FViewer: I added some code to disable the use of placement matrices in FRTexture when the texture is bound to a NURBS surface. Bottom line: Max -> Export works, import does not. Maya -> Export works, import works for all Maya-generated files and some isolated cases of Max-generated files. Viewer -> Can display the export data of both Max and Maya.

• 3026 by ewhittom

  ColladaMaya: Added material import/export for NURBS surfaces. More tests will be needed in order to correct the texture coordinates since Maya expose them as patches in u and v direction. I added a function in the CShaderHelper class to find the shading engines linked to the given dependency node. Materials seem to work but I'm not familiar enough with Maya's API to say its the best approach to the problem. FCollada: Due to Maya's NURBS surfaces texcoord representation I added a method to build a default texture surface to the FCDGeometryNURBSSurface class.

• 3002 by glaforte

  ColladaMaya: Added export option to disable the export of per-vertex color animations: which speed up the performance for all non-animated cases of per-vertex colors.