Export to maya

Bug Reports
#1

Hello everyone !

I’m a quite new user to World Machine… I own the standard 1.25. After some nice renders in Terragen, now I spent these last few months learning Maya… Now, I have plenty of stuff created into Maya, and I’d like to use World Machine to create the best landscapes for my scenes and projects.

I learned how to use WM (though I’m from far unexperienced into this, still learning)…

Now, I’d like to test what it will look like into Maya from a landscape created into WM.

I know this sounds stupid, but i’m quite a big newbie in converting formats, or to know what to export into to get the same result in another software…

For my final project, this is what i’d like to do :

  • create a landscape into WM.
  • export it to Vue d’Esprit to populate the landscape with trees, rivers, and other stuff
  • export it all to Maya to integrate all my different objects created into Maya, and have a nice mental ray render.

How can I accomplish that ?

Or at least this :

  • create a landscape into WM
  • Export it to Maya

Thanks for your ideas, as I have no idea at all how it could work…

#2

You have 2 main options - import as geometry (less versatile, high geometry load, potentially more accurate) or import as an image map and use displacement to create the terrain. If Maya supports any common 16 bit image formats then the 2nd option will be easier and more versatile. WM currently supports the following 16 bit image formats: PovRAY PNG, RAW16, and PGM (Portable Gray Map). I doubt Maya directly supports any of those but it might support 16 bit TIFF, in which case you can output to .ter and then use the free Terraconv utility to convert to TIFF, then import into Maya. If none of those formats are supported then perhaps there is another import path but we’d need to know what was available for bringing into Maya.

  • Oshyan
#3

Thanks for your reply…

But as I’m quite new into environments stuffs, I still encounter problems…

My first question is : how can I “import geometry” in Maya, without having an “export geometry” in WM ? I don’t quite good understand that… I thought the only files WM can export, are heightmap images. Am I wrong about that ? Can i export geometry too ? That would be so cool !

My second question is relative to the second part of your answer… I found a way to import the WM heightmaps into Maya… Here is how I do it… I export from WM in RAW16 or 32. I import this file in Photoshop with a plugin I found somewhere here in the forum, that was originally dedicated to 3DSMax. But it works also… I export from Photoshop into Tiff, which is the recommended file format for using in Maya.

From there, I create a polyPlane in Maya, and I plug in the displacement map into the object. The result is very poor. Perhaps something I don’t do correctly, but can’t figure it out. Here is a quick render :

Original terrain created in WM. Very basic, nothing has been changed, for testing purposes :

Actual render when plugged into the displacement map channel of the object :

As you can see, we can barely see the height, even at close-up…

Perhaps something I don’t do correctly… If someone has any idea on that, I will be very pleased in hearing what I don’t do correctly…

Thanks for your reading, and suggestions !

#4

Well, after some tests, I finally accomplished the export from WM to Vue d’Esprit perfectly… Something must be wrong in my parameters in Maya…

I think I’m going to do some post-compositing with some renders out of Vue and Maya…

Thanks for your help…

But if someone know why it seems not to work into Maya, it will be very welcome…

#5