Hey guys, was wondering if support for bringing multiple objects under a group in maya is there (I know there is a way to use the fetch sop for bringing in transforms which is why I was wondering whether bringing in multiple meshes was supported yet)

thank you!

That's not supported right now. A decent workaround might be to use Maya's “Mesh -> Combine” to combine the meshes into one. And by keeping the construction history, that's fairly procedural too.

Uhmm that is a good point I could keep the history. The thing is that I need the output of my digital asset to work on non combined pieces (ie I am layout uvs on multiple objects as a single entoty). I am going to see though if somehow I can leverage the history to bring back the output uvs to the original meshes somehow.

But yeah, the ability to be able to Marshall multiple meshes and consume them in houdini as groups in a single detail would be super duper

Ideally, the Maya plug-in should somehow marshal geometries with groups, most likely through the use of Maya sets.

What if you color each mesh with a different color per vertex, and then use an utility asset to split the mesh into groups by colors?

Hey that is a great idea! Let me see if I can use that somehow to preserve the separation. That's huge!

hey looks like I could also simply set a ton of inputs in my maya wrapper node

However, one thing I am wondering… is there a way to fetch the name of the mesh being inputted? if not, no biggie, I could always just re-fetch it later by name I presume

This may be a way to support multiple meshes in the short term I think if:

- we were passing the geo name as a detail attribute
- we had a means to pass an point index attribute back to maya to ensure the output meshes remained ordered as they were before (i.e. if a @pointnum explicit attribute exists, perhaps the engine can simply use it to order the points in a particular fashion on creation?)

grayOlorin
- we were passing the geo name as a detail attribute

Ah, this is an interesting idea. Adding special detail attributes for inputs should be pretty easy.

I was actually thinking of doing something similar for controlling the output nodes when they are created by sync. So that certain attributes, like motionVectorColorSet, can be set when the mesh node is created by the sync process. We could also name output mesh nodes according to these special detail attributes. This won't be as simple as the input case though, and require quite a bit more work though.

grayOlorin
- we had a means to pass an point index attribute back to maya to ensure the output meshes remained ordered as they were before (i.e. if a @pointnum explicit attribute exists, perhaps the engine can simply use it to order the points in a particular fashion on creation?)

So the idea here is that you group each input, and then merge them together. Then, when outputting back into Maya, rely on Engine to split up the mesh into the original pieces by groups. I would have expected the face and vertex order to be maintained already.

yeah I think detail attributes could be a really nice way to pass information back and forth in between the engine and the host environment I like the idea to be able to use detail attributes to drive things.

On that note, what are your thoughts on being able to have post cook/sync scripts that can be triggered in the host environment after a cook? (almost like a postCook python module in the digital asset). I could use this, for example, to trigger a DG node hook up in maya

So the idea here is that you group each input, and then merge them together. Then, when outputting back into Maya, rely on Engine to split up the mesh into the original pieces by groups. I would have expected the face and vertex order to be maintained already.

Ill give that a shot. that would be phenomenal if it kept the indices!

grayOlorin
On that note, what are your thoughts on being able to have post cook/sync scripts that can be triggered in the host environment after a cook? (almost like a postCook python module in the digital asset). I could use this, for example, to trigger a DG node hook up in maya

Yeah, I had the same thing in mind too. Once a framework is in place for simple things like naming nodes and setting node attributes, it should be easy to extend it to support executing arbitrary scripts too.