Hi,
I was wondering if there is a way to cache out the visibility channel of the geometry.
This is very important to us, and to anyone how would like to bridge Max and Maya through XMesh, I would guess,
as this information right now seems to be ignored.
I’d be happy to read your thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Aviv
Currently we do not use the visibility channel at all.
I’m curious about how you’d want this to work. I assume you still want to save and load the invisible objects? And after loading, you’d want to be able to change the visibility as usual in Maya?
I see why this is tricky, as Max don’t have the exact visibility channel,
but unfortunately, Maya animators like to use this channel to quickly show\hide\switch rigs.
I really liked your visibility handling in the Max implementation, as it made rayfire caching viable.
Something like this (don’t save if less then 1), should at least make this visibility switching workflow work.
Of course, you could also go through each object’s hierarchy in Maya and decide what is the current visibility value for it,
and then save a separate channel for each node.
Then in max load it to the visibility track, which will make the scene messy, but you will get the exact animation per node.
This probably needs to be decided by the user, with a drop-down or something, as in XMesh MX.
Maya-wise, I don’t think you need direct control over this channel pose-cache,
but changes to the cache’s playback should affect it the same way it affects the transformation values.
Thank you for your feedback!
We really should provide the same option in our Maya saver. I’ll add this to our to-do list.
Saving the visibility track is a good idea, but it would be difficult to add right now. I’ll add it to our wish list for future development.