I bought maya on ebay and have a question about maya-Unity workflow. I find that I’m confused in such a way that suggests either I’m going about it wrong, or that a feature is missing somewhere, but I’m not sure which.
In maya, I have a scene that is made up of instanced objects. I desire the flexibility that if I need to make a change to an object, that change is propagated to the instances. I save this as a .mb in my Unity Assets folder.
The import goes fine, and I drag the desired collection of objects onto a prefab and bring that into the Unity scene. The problem is that it appears Unity doesn’t import the instances. If I copy the object in Maya, the copies appear in Unity but then I lose the connection and have to manually propagate changes (very time consuming).
The reason I don’t just making one object in Maya and use it as a prefab in Unity then lay out the scene out in Unity is that Unity doesn’t have snap so it’s not a great layout tool at the moment. I need to align seams precisely and typing each object’s position in manually is too cumbersome / inflexible.
So the question is, is there a way to get Unity to support grabbing the instances when it does it’s internal .mb-.fbx conversion?
could you import one object from maya and set it up how you need it, and another file with dummy objects with your exact positions - then use an editor script that replaces your positioned dummys with the prefab? i haven’t done this yet but its what i’m going to try eventually when i need exact placement. (though i’m secretly hoping we get snap in unity after a while ; )
offtopic but i’m wondering - did you get maya at a decent price? are you able to register it with a resold package?
Yeah the editor script idea has come up, before. Guess that is the best way, just wasn’t sure if I wasn’t missing something, as Unity supports prefabs and maya supports ‘prefabs’ via instances, I thought maybe I was being obtuse (it happens!).
It’s worth noting the maya instances do come through into Unity, but only as “dummy” objects.
I guess a replacement script is the best we can do until FBX supports maya instances as geometry.
*edit; as for maya, i bought from one of the cheaper auctions (but not the obviously cheap!) Version seems legit, it installed and runs fine, but I honestly didn’t look too closely otherwise. Good luck!
Solution update:
Looks like maya instances are exported afterall. The problem was one of process while in Maya. Previously, I had created empty parent objects and dragged the groups of objects to the parent then instanced the parent. In Maya this shows the instance as identical to the original parent+children, but when brought into Unity it only knows the (empty) parent.
The solution is to select all the children individually and create your instance from that selection, then bring the instances into a new parent (empty) object. There is a setting to automatically create this on instance (Duplicate Special).
The result is that the instances appear in Unity + I retain the editing flexibility in Maya. Hurrah! =)