I have an animated mesh that has the velocities in mapping channel 2 - I am guessing there is just a 1:1 vertex mapping
Is there likely to be any way that I can copy these values to the “velocity” channel (whatever that is - XMesh talks about it)?
Rhys.
The Velocity channel is not native to Max meshes and right now you cannot do anything to copy the mapping into it - XMesh Saver generates it internally when producing the sequence, and XMesh Loader uses it to move the vertices on sub-frames.
Mapping channels use the faces and their 3 corners to match mapping vertices to mesh vertices. So in theory each mesh vertex could have as many different mapping values as there are faces using that vertex. But I assume in the case of Velocity all map vertices would have the same value. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that you could do with that data right now.
I guess a wish could be made for the ability to provide a Magma interface within the XMesh Loader or pre-process the channels during their loading from disk before the meshing… We have already logged a similar wish for Frost (being able to run Magma flows on the incoming particle data channels before the meshing).
I guess the problem is, that you can’t guarantee a 1:1 mapping, even though it definitely has it in this case.
Something like being able to redirect the channels when saving them in XMesh would save my day.
A maxscript tool to be able to set velocities explicitly would be HUGELY useful.
I’ve racked my brains and I can’t think of any way I can achieve this without you guys adding something on your end.