Export2Maya - Export Unity Scene to Maya Scene File

Export2Maya will export your Unity scene to the Maya Ascii file format, generating Maya scene files for you.

Asset store link:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/17079



Ver 2.2.0 supports the following:
- Rewritten from the ground up
- New Edge Generation Method - 3x faster
- Skinned Mesh Export *
- Blendshape Export - Single & Multi Frame
- Mesh Normals
- Mesh UVs
- Mesh Lightmap UVs (with correct tiling and offset)
- Mesh Vertex Colors
- Per-Object and Per-Face Material Assignment
- Terrain Export *
- Directional Light Export
- Point Light Export
- Spot Light Export
- Area Light Export
- Display Layer Lightmap Association. Objects that share the same lightmap index will be grouped under different display layers for easy selection in Maya.
- Includes accompanying Maya MEL script for easy scene setup once inside Maya.

Note - Skinned Mesh bind poses cannot be exported currently due to limitations in the way Unity stores bind poses for skinned meshes.
Note - Terrain detail meshes and grass are not currently supported yet. Planned for next version.
Note - Texture Export relies on your shader having standard named shader properties. Supported properties: _MainTex, _SpecGlossMap, _BumpMap, and _EmissionMap.

Screenshots:



As always if you find a bug, or have a suggestion to make this tool better, do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Great that this has been released! I was reading the WIP thread every day for updates.

Something else I'd like support for is animations, I have an animated camera in my unity scene and I'd like to export that animation so I can render a video of it in maya.

 

@popMark - Ya know, I didn't even think about animated cameras. This should be very easy to do, I'll put it on the to do list.

 

Fishypants, will this export out Marmoset shaders correctly? Also any plans to add light exports? I've already setup a lot of lights in my unity scene, and it would suck to set those up again in Maya.

 

@Psychon - I have not used Marmoset yet, so I do not know how their shaders are setup. If they define their shader properties following Unity's shader naming convention ( ie - they define _MainTex ) then it should grab the textures ok. If not then the shader itself will be exported but the textures will not. I'm currently working on a way to map which properties of your Unity shaders map to which properties of the Maya shaders. I'm hoping to have this done relatively soon.

Lights are added to the list of things to implement. I would say next version will include terrain export, lights, and cameras with animation data. With a follow up release with skinned mesh support and the improved texture export.

 

Thanks for the reply. Looking forward to next release.

 

Hi! Does this mean, that I can export my scene into Maya, render lightmaps to texture, save them back into Unity and go on. I.e., no additional work with unwrapping, atlasing and e.t.c?

 

@RyuMaster - Yes, this sort of workflow is possible, but keep in mind there will be some setup involved once inside Maya.

For example, if your mesh has lightmap UVs inside Unity then the UVs of your exported meshes will have a secondary "lightmap" UV set once you load them into Maya, which you can use to bake to (both Mental Ray and VRay support baking to alternate UVs). I would highly recommend VRay for baking lightmaps as you can create a render element of just the light data (which is what a lightmap is) which you can plug back into Unity. The only catch at the moment is there is no easy way to select all the objects that belong to each lightmap. (you would basically have to do it by hand, which can be tedious). You would have to select all the objects that belong to each lightmap, combine them, then bake to the lightmap uvset of the combined mesh. This will generate a lightmap texture that you can plug directly back into Unity and everything will line up correctly.

For the second release of Export2Maya, I am thinking of having the exporter group all the meshes of each lightmap under different display layers for easy selection inside Maya. Layers are nice because you can easily select the objects that belong to the layer and you don't need to touch the object hierarchy.

If you are looking to use Export2Maya to bake lightmaps, I would recommend waiting until the new features are added, as it will make your life a lot easier.

 

Thank you a lot for the reply. Then I'll bookmark this asset, and buy it immediately once light mapping workflow is ready.

 

So just to keep everyone updated, I have been taking notes on features that people are requesting. I can't promise all of these in the next release (as I would like to have regular updates instead of waiting a long time for a massive update), but this is the official list of things that I will be adding at some point, sorted by whats most likely going to be included first:

Better Texture Export Technique: Better way to map custom shader attributes to Maya attributes.
Better Renaming Method using DG Paths: Right now it looks at any name and if there is a conflict it renames it, but this will mimic Maya's rename functionality better.
Layers for Lightmap Grouping: This will make it easy to select which objects belong to which lightmap set in Maya, and make baking lightmaps in Mental Ray or Vray a LOT easier.
Lights Export: For relighting inside Maya.
Option to export objects as instances or meshes: Exporting each object as a unique mesh can be memory intensive. This will allow you to export meshes as instances.
Animation Export: Going to look at getting animation curve data exporting so your animations come across as well.
Terrain Export
Skinned Mesh Export

As more features are added I will push out updated versions of the exporter

 

It would be also nice to have "Update" export. For the large scene, it might take several hours to export now. So, say if I add some new object later, of transform current one, it would be good to update only those two, without re-exporting whole scene again.

 

@RyuMaster - Hmmm, interesting idea. Could be very tricky to try to implement, but I will look into it. In the meantime as a workaround you could always select the new object and export it by itself. Even if it is parented under other objects, all the transforms of its parents will be exported as well so the object will line up in the same position. Then it would just be a matter of parenting the newly exported object to the old object in Maya and it should line up.

I do like the idea though of a simple "Update Scene" function. I'll see if I can come up with something for that.

 

Been working on getting the lightmap workflow working with Export2Maya. Right now, it finds what lightmap index each object is assigned to, and creates a display layer inside Maya for easy selection and baking. Testing out generating lightmaps inside Maya using Vray. So far the results are working pretty well. Need to tweak a couple things as you can see a few objects didn't get mapped correctly, but it has to do with how the objects are assigned to the layers. I will get this fixed then push out a new version of Export2Maya.

Screenshots! These were taken inside Unity, and all the lightmaps were generated inside Maya using Vray:

 

Alright, got the lightmap quirk fixed. Also wrote an accompanying MEL script for use inside Maya that will convert your exported scene into a lightmap-ready bake scene. Haven't run into any issues yet, so I will add the Lightmap Baking Workflow to the Export2Maya documentation and upload the new version.

Some more screens! I was impressed with how well Vray handled the Angry Bots scene. There is only 1 directional sun light and 1 sky light, the rest of the lighting is coming from the emissive materials.

 

Ver 1.0.1 is Released. Small update but includes the following:

Display Layer Creation - Display layers will be created for each lightmap texture in your Unity scene, and all the objects that use that lightmap texture will be linked to the display layer. This makes it easy to select and combine objects that all belong to the same lightmap texture.

Export2Maya.mel - Maya MEL script that will combine all the objects in your Maya scene for you based on the display layers it finds. Basically open your Maya file and run it and you will have a couple objects ready to bake lightmap textures to.

 

HI Fishypants,

I just bought Export2Maya and ran into a slight issue. I'm using the skyshop and shaderforge shaders and they export out as gray blinn materials. For my skyshop materials I'm doing things slightly differently where I'm not using a texture, instead I'm just using the diffuse color picker. On the other hand the shaderforge material does have a texture but that doesn't work as well. Is there any chance you could add support for these?

 

@Psychon - Your problem sounds like Skyshop and Shaderforge use different shader attribute names than the standard Unity attribute names in the shaders. Export2Maya will look for the attribute _MainTex in the shader, and it uses this attribute to figure out what texture should be plugged into the Color attribute in the Maya shader.

This works great when people write their shaders to use the standard Unity shader attribute names, but when they don't it becomes tricky trying to figure out what texture goes where.

For example, say one shader is written to use BaseColor as the main texture. Another uses CustomColor. Another uses Color. Since Unity lets you name your attributes any way you want, trying to guess at what attribute goes where becomes almost impossible.

My initial reaction was to get all these separate Unity tools and see how they are setting up their shaders and what their attributes are named, but I don't think this is the best solution. This still wouldn't solve the issue of any custom shaders people write, and if those Unity tools ever change, it will break Export2Maya and will need to constantly be updated.

I am thinking a better solution would be to create a shader definition file, so an additional tool inside Export2Maya that would look at all the shaders in your project and create a list. Then in the list you could select the shaders one at a time and map their attributes to the Maya shader attributes. This way whenever Export2Maya encounters a shader, it would look it up in the shader definition file and know which attributes to plug the textures into.

This is the best method I have been able to come up with at the moment. If anyone has any other suggestions I would be open to trying them out. It would be annoying to have to go through each shader and map it, but it would only have to be done once, then Export2Maya would know how to export the shader correctly.

I have been working on this shader attribute mapper since I finished up the lightmapping workflow, so hopefully I can get something out soon.

 

Hello Fishypants,

I just wanted to thank you for this tool. We needed to export the scenes so the art team could start fitting stuff into the level, so it was either creating a tool from scratch or using something that works properly.

Your tool worked like a charm, I hope you can continue updating the tool and we'll definitely recommend it.

JP
http://headlesschickengames.com

 

@loko08 - Very glad to hear that Export2Maya is helping you guys out!

I am always working on it, and it will be continuously updated. Also if you have any ideas or feature requests let me know and I will add it to the list. I would like to make this tool as robust as possible. Cheers!

 

Hello Fishypants, we are having a little issue with the scaling, it seems like on MayaLT2015. After exporting the scene, the scaling (using 1 meter on maya and 1 unit on Unity3D) need to be set to 0.85 in order for the scaling to fit.

Is this a bug?? or intended?

Thanks in advance

 

@ Loko08 - Hmmm interesting indeed. I was setting the scale relative to the default Maya settings of 1 unit = 1 cm. I have always had issues changing the units in Maya and a lot of people recommend against it. But if need be I am wondering if it would be helpful to specify what units your Maya scene file uses when you export a scene from Export2Maya? If so this might fix your scaling problem if you know you are going to be using meters instead of centimeters.

 

Thing is that we are both working (modeler and me) on meters so we don't get any physics surprises. I do think it would be helpful to allow people to set their scaling when exporting.

Thanks for the quick reply btw, appreciate it.

 

Sure thing, let me run some tests and see if I can get that implemented quickly. I don't think that would be too difficult to add.

 

@loko08 - I sent you a PM.

 

I'd love to see the ability to export a skinned mesh, even if it was just a posed character, back into maya. with its bones/skin still intact. or into an FBX format even.

 

@justifun - skinned mesh support is being worked on and will be in a future release, as well as terrain export.

 

For some reason I was trying to import again and I cant seem to get the export to maya selection in the "Window" tab. Ive tried re importing and deleting the asset. Any suggestions??? The folder is in the assets folder as well.

 

@prestonplatt - Hmmm, that's very strange indeed. I would try deleting the Export2Maya folder in your project. Save your project and close Unity. Then reload Unity and try importing the package again.

What version of Unity are you using? Also, Free / Professional? Does your project have a lot of scripts in it that could be causing the compilation to take a while? More info will help to figure out what the issue could be.

 

@Fishypants It was some weird issue inside the project. Just made another one and copied all the assets over and it worked fine. Not an issue id worry about. Getting everything converted with bump maps with V-ray materials can be a little tedious but seriously no big deal considering the results you get so quickly.

Would still LOVE to get the terrain exported even if its just a base ground mesh with no texture as a starting point that I could paint on. heres a little WIP of something im exporting for fun. No dialing in at all these are super quick results.

 

@prestonplatt - Nice! That looks awesome! I've unfortunately been a bit side tracked with work, lot's of late night hours, so I haven't had as much time as I would like to dedicate to working on Export2Maya, but I am still making progress on it. Currently in the middle of getting skinned mesh support implemented and terrain export will be next.

 

You should be aware that right now if you made animation export in this, you'd probably make a bunch of money very quickly because people get a TON of animations from Mixamo right now, however, these animations cannot be edited in Maya without a $1500 Mixamo All Access price tag. If your plugin could export animation, all of the people buying animations from Mixamo would see a lot of value in what you're making.

 

@BobBobson108 - That could be very useful in that situation. I was planning on adding animation support, it was going to have to wait until after I get skinned mesh + terrain support implemented. But, it's definitely on the list of things to add

 

Yes, terrain would be very nice to have. I have terrain I have to lightmap, so I'm scratching my head, how to work around this. Maybe converting terrain to mesh firstly, will allow me to use lightmaps which the mesh produces on the actual terrain, though I know that terrain is not using atlasing and terrain lightmapping is somewhat different from the basic mesh object.

 

Are there plans for similar tools for Blender ?

 

@nasos_333 - As Maya is my package of choice, and I know absolutely nothing about Blender, I will not be making an exporter for Blender.

 

I can't export my scene, because it simply takes ages. I can see that problematic models are those with lots of vertices. For example, I have house mesh with 60k verts, and its export time is ~20 minutes. Does export time gets exponentially longer with bigger vertex count because of the way export2Maya is coded?

 

@RyuMaster - 60k verts is a lot for a single mesh. You're right at the limit of the maximum allowed number of vertices a mesh can hold. There is also a conversion time that needs to happen, because of the differences in the way Maya stores mesh data and how Unity stores mesh data. Unity is optimized for fast data access, defining polygons using vertex indices. Maya however, defines polygons by Edge connections. Unity doesn't support the concept of edge connections so an edge connection list needs to be generated - aka - you need to convert the data from Unity format to Maya format. Another issue could simply be the fact that writing ASCII files takes much longer than writing Binary files.

I originally wanted to have an option for saving scenes either as Maya Ascii or Maya Binary, but there is almost zero information on the Maya Binary format. I have been meaning to test simply converting the ascii data to binary and see if the scene still loads in Maya, but there is no guarantee it will work. If it does work then it might provide a nice speed boost to the export time.

 

@Fishypants Hello, I just bought Export2Maya and I'm currently testing it. Thank you for creating this in the first place!

One thing I noticed is that when importing the resulting .ma file into my current Maya scene it comes in 100 times too small. In other words I think there's a scaling problem at export time. For the record my working units in Maya are set to centimeters.

It's not a huge deal but do you think there could be a way of adding an Export Scale float field in the exporter's interface so you could choose at which scale you export?

 

Hey Seith,

Just out of curiosity, what are your FBX import settings for the models you are bringing into Unity? I find I usually need to set the scale of mine to about 0.1 for the project I am working on. Chances are the models are too big in Maya to begin with.

Adding a scaling option shouldn't be too hard of an issue, but keep in mind the goal of Export2Maya is to export your scene reliably from Unity to Maya back to Unity. Meaning, what you export out of Unity using Export2Maya should import back in at 1 scale and match perfectly. This makes creating models / collision geo fairly easy and straight forward.

Are you finding this is not the issue? Or is what is exported out of Unity not matching your original scene files? (It should not be at the same scale of your original scene files, if you adjusted the FBX import scale on import)

But to sum things up, yes, I belive it would be a simple fix to have a scale option, if you really need / want it.

 

And just to give everyone a heads up, Export2Maya is still being worked on. Work schedules have definitely impacted the speed at which I can get new updates out, but it is still progressing nicely.

I have had to redo most of the code to make way for other features besides standard mesh export (skinned mesh export, lights, terrains, etc). I have lights exporting now, and am laying the ground work for skinned mesh export. It's . . . tricky to say the least. In Unity the skinned mesh data is easy to read and setup but Maya is kinda crazy. There are a lot of connections and nodes that need to be made and data to be set, but I'm working my way through it.

I also have a prototype for how I would like to handle shader export, which should accommodate custom shaders fairly easily. So it wont matter if you are using Marmoset shaders, RTP shaders, or custom writen shaders, you should be able to configure any shader and customize how its exported.

Lots and lots of work, but it is progressing. Stay tuned for updates.

 

My Unity FBX import scale is at the default value of 0.01 which works fine because again I work in centimeters within Maya. It means that a 100cm object in Maya comes in at 1m in Unity.

Ah I think that's the issue: the units scale difference between Unity (meters) and Maya (centimeters) make it so that there cannot be a 1 for 1 scale relationship. Unless again you work in meters in Maya (which is a big no-no for anything but very large architectural projects).

Currently if I import something from Unity it comes in 100 times too small (and its position is also wrong of course). And if I re-export it from Maya then obviously it comes in 100 times too small in Unity as well (since all the root nodes' scale are set to 1, meaning 1cm).

There are two sides to the issue:

1) Export from Unity:

- Export from Unity
- Import in Maya
- Scale all the imported root nodes to 100
- Manually change each of their translate values to be x100

Then I would have the imported objects at the right position and scale. But if I want to export them again I would now have to:

2) Export from Maya:

Either:
- Freeze scale on each imported root node.
- Export from Maya

Or:
- Un-parent all the children from the imported root nodes
- Set all the imported root nodes scales to 1
- Re-parent all the child nodes
- Export from Maya

And then the objects would arrive at the correct size and position in Unity. So as you can see it's pretty involved.

If at least there was a way to set the export scale within the Export2Maya's interface it would alleviate the issue somewhat (step 1 could basically be skipped). And I could take care of the way I export from Maya (step 2). Do you think that's feasible on your side...?

 

@Seith,

Sure, I'll add the scale option in there. Shouldn't be too difficult.

 

Export2Maya Update 1.0.8:
Hey everyone, just wanted to give you a little update on what is happening with Export2Maya. First off, apologies for the long wait, its been a while since an update but hopefully I have more free time to work on the exporter now. Secondly, I wanted to give an update of whats been added already, and whats to come.

1) Skinned Mesh support! (finally) It is almost done. Its about 60% there. The skinned meshes export correctly, and I have all the nodes that need to be created for the skinning, just have to connect everything together. It's difficult because Unity doesn't have "bones" like in Maya, only transforms, so you have to do a bit of a workaround to figure out which objects should be bones and which shouldn't. Its almost done.

2) Added light support. Your scene lights should all export now (Spot Light, Area Light, Directional Light, and Point Light). I have tried to match the light intensities as close as possible in Maya, although with the way that lights in Unity work, it will never be a 100% perfect match, but its close.

3) Added option for Units Type export. You can specify upon export what units you would like your scene to default to (centimeters, meters, etc)

4) Added Export Scale Multiplier. If you are working in Maya and bring in your FBX but your import scale is something other than 1 (ex the default of 0.01) then when you export your scene from Unity back to Maya, the scale will not match. So the Export Scale Multiplier will compensate for that, allowing you to scale your scene at export time to whatever size you like (including vertex positions, light positions, and transform positions)

This plus a bunch of bug fixes. I'm planning on pushing out a new version to the Asset Store once the skinned mesh export is complete.

After that, next up on the list is Better Shader Export, Terrain Export, and Animation Export.

 

Hi @Fishypants - are you close to releasing the new update?

 

Hey EyeHawk,

Unfortunately work schedules have prevented me from having an accurate estimate of when the next release will be. I work in the VFX industry, and we just finished up this season of Walking Dead, which is what was consuming all of my free time. I do have a pocket of free time now, so I want to push to get this next version out ASAP before we get busy again.

I apologize for the wait, it just gets tricky with work schedules. Hopefully I will have the next release out soon.

 

Hey Fishy, no worries I understand how it is juggling multiple roles. Good luck with TDW - it's one of my favorite shows!

 

Can you update Export2Maya to support Unity 5 please?

 

@justifun - sure, let me roll that out. I'll let you know when its live.

 

Ok Unity 5 compatible version of Export2Maya is submitted and awaiting review. Hopefully it will be live soon.

 

Nice work. Just bought Export2Maya... looks great so far. Any progress on Terrains, or have I missed something? I generally work in film, and to be able to quickly put together terrains in Unity, and jump back over to Maya and then possible back again, would be sweet. I don't really care to edit them further as "terrain" after coming back from Maya, just would like to be able to get them out for a bit of further tweeting on the Maya side. Great job!