Exporting from Maya to Vizard
 

Hi all. I am trying to use Maya 6.5 to design a realistic looking virtual hallway that I can import into Vizard. I have designed the hallway in Maya exactly as I want it, including textures and lighting. What I want to do, ideally, is transfer that world, as it is, into Vizard. So far, I am having a lot of difficulty.

I have tried exporting from Maya using two different file format - VRML and OBJ - and I have run into trouble with both.

With VRML, the basic geometry looks OK, but all the objects appear dark, many shaders and textures are not displayed and/or imported accurately (particularly transparent shaders -- a couple look right, but most don't), no lighting is imported, and there appears to be a distorted copy of the full model displayed at (0,0,0), which is both weird and annoying.

With OBJ, the geometry seems to import properly, and there is no weird distorted duplicate, but the shaders/textures and lighting still don't display properly. Transparent shaders don't seem to work at all.

I realize that it may not be possible to get a Maya world to display exactly in Vizard, but I would like to come as close as possible to doing that. What I would love is a step by step explanation of how to get a world from Maya to Vizard: what format should I use? Should I do anything to the world before exporting? What export settings should I use? etc.

I would appreciate any help here. Thanks!

There is a Maya exporter to the OSG format, the internal format of Vizard. I've not used the Maya exporter much but chances are it'll be better than dealing with the OBJ format. Much more material properties can be carried through this way.

You can download this free exporter at the author's website here:

http://www.diosoft.com/soft/osgmaya/

Thanks a lot for the reply, but this exporter plug-in seems to be incompatible with Maya 6.5 (it only works with 6.0 and 5.0). Do you know if an update for the plug-in is planned soon? Any other ideas? Thanks a bunch for the help. I appreciate it.