Osg2Maya

A Maya plug-in for importing OpenSceneGraph format files (*.osg | *.ive)

Sung-Hee Lee

Osg2Maya is a Maya plug-in that imports OpenSceneGraph files ( *.osg or *.ive ) to Maya.

This lets you produce nicely rendered images of the OSG scenes using Maya.

Osg2Maya has the following features:

l Most PrimitiveSet are imported: TRIANGLES, TRIANGLE_STRIP, TRIANGLE_FAN, QUADS, and QUADS_STRIP types are imported.

l Some Shapes in ShapeDrawable classes are imported: Sphere, Box, and Cylinder.

l User can select the default shader from Lambert, Blinn, and Phong shaders in Options.

l Scene graph is largely preserved on importable nodes (see limitations below).

However, Osg2Maya currently has some limitations:

l osg::Group : among osg::Group and its derived classes, only osg::MatrixTransform is preserved and translated to “transform node” in Maya. For example, if an OSG scene graph has 3 nodes, A (MatrixTransform), B (Group), and C(Geode). C is B’s child, and B is A’s child. Then Osg2Maya translates A and C to A’ and C’ respectively since A and C are the only importable nodes, and then set C’ as the child of A’.

l osg::Geode : among osg::Drawables, only osg::Geometry and osg::ShapeDrawable are imported.

n osg::Geometry

- POINTS, LINES, LINE_STRIP, and LINE_LOOPS are ignored.

- Normals are automatically computed by Maya unless they are provided with PER_VERTEX binding in osg.

- Colors are ignored. Material properties should be defined through osg::StateSet.

n osg::ShapeDrawable

- Only Sphere, Box, and Cylinder primitives are imported.

- TesselationHints are ignored.

- Texture coodinates are ignored.

- Shape::color information is ignored. Material properties should be defined through osg::StateSet.

l osg::Material : specular color and shininess are ignored (with Lambert shader) or imported with naive rules(with BLINN or PHONG shader).

Osg2Maya vs. osgMaya:

l Osg2Maya is only importing OSG files to Maya whereas osgMaya has both import/export functionalities.

l However, Osg2Maya surpasses osgMaya in importing capability. Actually I pruned exporting functions and improved importing functions of osgMaya to create Osg2Maya.

This plug-in has been test on Maya Unlimited 6.0 with Windows XP.

Installation:

1. Unzip osg2maya_1p0_bin.zip to any folder you want. (Let us assume we have unzipped files to C:\osg2maya\plug-in)

2. In the destination folder, you should have two files: osgImport.mll and osgImportOptions.mel

3. Register new Environment Variables to Windows (for more information on setting Environment Variables: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310519).

- MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH = C:\osg2maya\plug-in;

- MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH = C:\osg2maya\plug-in;

4. Run Maya

5. In Maya, click on Window->Settings/Preferences->Plug-in Manager, and then click on Browse.

6. Load osgImport.mll from your destination folder.

7. In Plug-in Manager window, check “osgImport.mll” box

Now, you should be able to import osg or ive format files to Maya.

Source code:

l The source code is distributed under GNU GPL.

l This code is based on Pavel Moloshtan’s osgMaya (http://www.diosoft.com/soft/osgmaya/) source code.

l In order to compile, you need to have OpenSceneGraph and Maya libraries installed on your computer.

l You are encouraged to improve the code!