Cinema 4d in tandem with maya: another arrow to your bows

[Astrid Kaufmat]

Last week we were reading some blog of a store and sl content creator.The maker was illustrting a way to combine cinema 4d as her favourite software to model and then to use blender to rig the boots.

Well , who knows me, I am curious If I see something then I have to find alternatives.Many Bloggers . fora users and slursrs know cinema 4d as an handicapped software not able to export for sl, like few others out there.

As it always happens in these cases it quite often depends on the collada exporter. For some reasons cinema 4d even if it's a very famous software in cinema studio ambient matured from amiga computers it has problem with the exporter .The possible answer to all this is that it doesn't include all the info that you need in the skin, hence it seems that SL reads there the infos, not being able to use other bones.

The rigging process ( I followed my friend action on web camera is quite easy as mine in maya) I have to say sadly some tools there let my friend avoid to use abweightlifter or other tools from maya cause it has the chance to transfer weight as you keep painting subtraxcting from some bones and moving it to the others.

what we've done for now is using as  file format to work in a team fbx. We used fbx 7.3 2013 with pla options enabled

This is the screenshot that I asked to get to show you so you could do the same settings as they were done for the model I got to play with in maya.

What I noticed once that the model sent to me was loaded in maya is that it was huge, so in outliner it was there, but not visible on screen untill I scrolled the wheel and moved pan view up up.

This probably is fixable getting both softwares to use the same meter units(we'll make more tests later), but not an iussue at all for the method that I ma showing you.

Howevver even if huge what I did was exactly to use the elementar manual procedure to export skin weights from maya.

So once selected the skin I exported it. here pay attention you may have errors according to the format you choose and the size of your weight maps .What has worked fine for me till now least for the fewq tests we did is  1024 and iff format to export. I leave here my snapshot so you could see.This doesn't mean tht other settings couldn't work either, just be adventurous and try yourself some if you like.

Once exported the weights it's easy to get them on your dress in maya.

All you need is a SL avatar (one of those taken from wiki page) so open it in maya, import your dress as dae but not rigged.scale and put it on the mannequine (the sl avatar properly). Bind your dress to the SL skeleton using the smooth bind.Then select your skin from outliner go to edit smooth bind and import weights .Tada one second and you have the weights that your  coworker, friend, partner, client had done in cinema 4d transferred properly in maya, export and enjoy

I am actually working to find also if blender could become a tandem partner, so We'll try more file formats on later. For sure I can tell you fbx fails ( due to logical iussues that you can guess the goddam gpl license, as for other fbx files from other softwares that I tried in blender.

Well with this for now you know that if you are a cinema 4d user and want to keep using this software rather than learning other ways maybe harder you can, just find a partner with maya or someone who can be doing the conversions of your files.

 

[Astrid Kaufmat]

An addendum to the previous post just ked now in chat. The version they used to send me the file to convert for secondlife is cinema 4d r15.

probably an useless detail, but keep handy in case you try with other versions.

 

for previous software versions this tandem seems still possible there is was a plugin not free named cdfbx that could allow you to export your rig from cinema to maya. that plugin is more oriented for exporting animations set. As long as in the method above you can transfer the weight and the rig works you can build then again the animations set in maya, so say for new versions of both softwares it's surpassed.

The rig in world works same as for maya and it's quite smooth too. I can say that if it wasn't just for the damm exporter ruinining cinema maya and cinema could be equivalent

From few searches it seems that can do also sculpties thanks to some materials that you can find around on web,what it lacks is a script like the one for maya, but like for maya it has a python compiler so I guess it can help you to somehow automatize the process.