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How to Open Quill FBX exports in Maya

nickladd
Protege
Hi, guys, I wanted to share my simple solution for importing paintings made in Quill and AnimVR into Maya so that the colors appear properly. It's been hard getting information on this so hopefully, this helps people who are having issues. This should work in Maya2015 onward.

1) First off, import the FBX/Alembic file into Maya. 

2) Download this shader: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7tjkq8x2r150yr7/vertexColor_shaderfx.ma?dl=0

3) Import the shader into your hypershade

4) Right click your mesh and assign the shader as a material.

5) Now turn on your textures in the viewport and you should be all set. If you find the colors are looking too pale turn off the color management button in the viewport.

If your Quill scene uses transparency then you can enable alpha in the hypershade settings for the material. If you get visual errors you need to turn on depth-peeling in the transparency settings in the viewport 2.0 options.

y7t9lpbnmju7.jpg

Good luck!



5 REPLIES 5

Sterling77
Rising Star

nickladd said:

Hi, guys, I wanted to share my simple solution for importing paintings made in Quill and AnimVR into Maya so that the colors appear properly. It's been hard getting information on this so hopefully, this helps people who are having issues. This should work in Maya2015 onward.

1) First off, import the FBX/Alembic file into Maya. 

2) Download this shader: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7tjkq8x2r150yr7/vertexColor_shaderfx.ma?dl=0

3) Import the shader into your hypershade

4) Right click your mesh and assign the shader as a material.

5) Now turn on your textures in the viewport and you should be all set. If you find the colors are looking too pale turn off the color management button in the viewport.

If your Quill scene uses transparency then you can enable alpha in the hypershade settings for the material. If you get visual errors you need to turn on depth-peeling in the transparency settings in the viewport 2.0 options.

y7t9lpbnmju7.jpg

Good luck!





This scene looks great ! I'm trying jump in to quill.
https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/52965/sterlings-sketchbook

chorne
Adventurer
Thank you nick for posting this!!!! Super helpful to the community!

Sneekypops
Explorer
This method has worked amazingly for me and a project I'm working on as of late. Thanks for posting this Nick. Hijacking this thread to post some questions regarding this workflow. In experimenting, I've noticed some peculiar things that perhaps some of the more experienced on here can help explain:

  • First off, import scale between FBX and Alembic seems to be at a 100 to 1 ratio respectively, and I'm not entirely sure which is retaining the proper scaling from what I created on the quill grid. I couldn't locate a section to uniformly scale them in the import settings. I'm aware you can fix the scale in the editor with out destroying the animation by increasing the scale of the alembic information by 100 in the xyz axis, but again, I'm just trying to better understand the cause of the scaling difference . 
  • The Vertex Uber Shader Joe Daniels offers works perfectly well with any FBX I export from Quill. Renders well in the Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer and I've gotten some crazy crisp results from that. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use that same shader on Alembic files. All I get is a black render in the viewport and render. I'd say screw it lets just stick with the fact that FBX works, but it's a big loss not to be able to take advantage of performance speeds Alembic offers. For someone who is a complete novice at shaders, it's a bit difficult to find this "rgba" parameter referenced in the thread that links over to this one (https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/49862/quill-to-maya). Any tips or help for someone who would be in my shoes?
Thanks for taking the time to read this.

TL;DR: Alembic/FBX importing and shader issues in Maya (2018). Why do they import at different scales? Why does using Joe Daniel's Vertex Uber Shader render black on Alembic files?

Sterling77
Rising Star
Fbx scales a unit export from Quill which is likely meters and alembic would come into Maya as a default cm - as with any transport from Maya to Houdini 1cm comes into Houdini as 100meters so you have to scale it down to 0.1 just the nature of the beast ( really Maya's fault ) 
https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/52965/sterlings-sketchbook

cocoalopez
Explorer
Regarding the rendering of the sequences in maya, anybody has any input on this? Tried to render the sequence with hardware, 2.0, software but no luck. Are there any special settings?