Unity Pro Maya Extensions: Part 1

Part 1 discusses how to get your work environment set up for using my Maya extensions with Unity, as well as how to get BlendShapes into Unity.

For more information on modifying your FBXMayaExport.mel script, see my online documentation here: http://adammechtley.com/downloads/python/documentation/amtools/1.05/namespace...

Note that I also neglected to show the workaround for getting BlendShape animation into Unity! In order to do this, the easiest method is to create some transforms in your scene to use as controls, and write an animation expression to link up their values to different target weights, as my tools will handle the automatic conversion of these expressions into C# code. Please see my Part 2 video for more information on animation expressions.

The other thing I neglected to mention in the video is that you can work around the issue of recomputing normals on models that have some hard edges by splitting the vertices in Maya in order to get the hard edge (so you have multiple points on top of each other). Since Unity has to do this in order to actually give you hard edges anyway, the cost is trivial.

The final thing I want to note is that I only really performance tested BlendShapes with skinned meshes on iOS devices, which is part of the reason I urge people to temper their expectations a bit. However, since iOS was my target platform, you may get perfectly good results on something like a standalone PC build. Please post here with your experiences!

You can download all of the Python and C# source code for this project at http://adammechtley.com. Please send me any bugs you find!

View Part 2 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTzdExgs4Js

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Unity
• Maya
• Python
• engine
• gaming

[goldLizzzard]

Great video, fantastic tools, but how to show package contents in windows? I'm a complete mac noob so I have absolutely no idea what an equivalent to that function might be. Thanks in advance..

[adammechtley]

@goldLizzzard I believe in Windows that the Tools folder is just somewhere in your Unity application directory (presumably something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Unity\Editor\Data\Tools)

[Sentientv2]

This is like my favorite gift on Christmas morning! Thank you so much Adam for sharing this. I've definitely got a good use for this stuff and I'll share the results with you when I get there. Might be a few months before there's a need in the project I've got, but there's definitely a need for the Blendshape magic.

Thank you again.

[adammechtley]

@Sentientv2 Glad to hear you have a use for it all! Looking forward to hearing how it works out for you.

[naturesuphoria]

Well done videos! I really appreciate the extra effort to creat quality instructional videos!

[YarrySP]

This was exactly what I was looking for. I wonder how expensive it is though.

[goldLizzzard]

@adammechtley Yeah, that was exactly the case. Thx

[goldLizzzard]

Oh, never mind...

Just learnt the meaning of the word "search" XD