Trouble exporting AC 3D view to MAYA for OSX

[rm]

Inspired by Ivan's spectacular photo realistic renderings, and disapointed with Art-lantis 4.5.6 lack of radiosity abilities, I downloaded Maya PLE for OSX and C4D to demos to try out their rendering abilities, and ease of use, or lack there of.

I installed both demo programs and they launch just fine in OSX 10.3.4.

So I exported a model that I have recentlly completed in AC 8.1 the latest build, and exported a 3D view using the default settings for both 3Dstudio ( which C4D just fine ) and Maya.

The .3ds file took about 3 minutes to process as this is a fairly complex model, same for saving as an Artlantis 4.5.6. file.

The Maya export simply hangs after creating about 3 different AC scratch files. I tried the same file on three different G4s same problem. It just seems to get stuck in processing hell. I get the little colored spinnig ball.....and nothing.

Is this a bug with the export plugin for MAYA in AC....or is there an obvious technique I am missing.

BTW, I saved from a 3d perspective view with the Open GL shaded mode.

Using OSX 10.3.4 on G4s...........any tips or help would be appreciated.

TIA,
Architects Design Forum, Ltd.


Robert Mariani

[Anonymous]

One more thing...
if your model is very large and have a lot objects...and you textures in archicad is ok
try to export 3ds with option "MATERIALS" this will reduce the number of poligons of your model !!! and rendering will be more faster too :wink:

[Andy Thomson]

Thanks choma, I'll give it a try sometime....

A.

[stefan]

FWIW, my tutorial for exporting from ArchiCAD into Cinema4D used the two formats 3DS & OBJ.

http://www2.asro.kuleuven.ac.be/asro/English/HOME/SBs/tutorial/tips/ac2c4d.htm

I prefer the 3DS path, but I also noticed that the textures & materials are exported through a separate MTL-file, that probably didn't get read by Cinema4D, but I suppose Maya will be able to read it just fine.

However, even if the material information is not there, the mapping coordinates are available in the geometry. This is controlled by applying the ArchiCAD texture maps to the geometry and seeing that they align, without having to assign additional UV(W) coordinates.

This is a very big timesaver, since manually setting all mapping to the geometry is a lot of work for orthogonal models and is almost impossible to do when you have curved geometry.

And I suppose that most things I say are valid for all software: 3ds max, Cinema4D, Maya, XSI, Lightwave etc...

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Try experimenting with the different OBJ-export options in ArchiCAD. You can always check the output in a text-editor, since it is a more or less human-readable format. Especially when the OBJ-file points to materials.