Maya PLE and MCDCX_ModelName

[King Mango]

Finally figured it out with the help of the creator of the PLE plug in. To export a simplified collision geometry at the same time as your level geometry, Assign the level geometry a name in the channel box like MyModelName. make the mc a child of the level geometry. then highlight the mc geometry and make the name (case sensitive) MCDCX_MyModelName now click the level geometry and export. The only drawback so far is that there is a material reference to the mc which I can not figure out how to remove. This places unnecessary load on resources. MCDCX_ shapes DO NOT have to be convex the ed will automatically make convex prims for Karma when you import.

[SuperApe]

I'll bet you can remove the material though the Hypergraph.
Or simply highlight the matierial tab in the object's attribute editor, Hit Select button at bottom (to make sure you're only selecting the material), and Delete?

[King Mango]

No can do. I opened the Hypergraph and it's connected to Lambert1 so I made a new checker lambert and named it CollMat and assigned that to the mc. Then in the Hypergraph I highlighted the CollMat and deleted and then a new material Lambert2SG or something was automatically created. I deleted that, and now clearly the mc has no material assigned in Maya, and clearly only one material now exists in the scene, but still two material slots in the SM browser. Here you can see no material in the mc's attribute editor

[NOS]

how easy is it to tex a mesh in Maya? is it as easy as selecting polys and adding a material? i hate max's texing system

[SuperApe]

It's not that hard; there's two parts. You assign a material to the poly (select polys, select material, assign) then you work on the UV mapping (select polys, go to UV Texture Editor panel in another window, move the 2D UV poly around in 2D UV space)


Mango:
I was afraid of that. Maya likes to automatically create stuff.
Well, there is a way to make an invisible texture in Ued, if would help.
I'm not spending any time on this problem, unfortunately, but the invisible texture I got as part of the WarpZone tutorial on Angel_Mapper's page.
(There is no stock invisible texture, you have to make one)
Good luck.

[King Mango]

Well the mc doesn't actually have visible polys, but Hourences says that extra slot is additional load on the GPU. So it looks normal, but this is the mesh that was imported as you see it in the earlier screenshot. The collision is invisible, and if I import the model w/o the mc, then there is only one material.

[King Mango]

Here is the mesh imported w/o collision.

[King Mango]

So I'm just curious, if I have fifty thousand mesh polys, and thirty thousand invisible coll polys are taxing the system because of material reference, that's going to be a pretty big hit on performance. I can't seem to narrow down if that's the case, but I do have some spots in the map where there are only ~100,000 total polys, but I'm getting thirty frames. I should be getting forty to fifty FPS in that case. There are some spots before I lowered fog and before I messed around with collision models where I was getting 200,000+ total polys and getting forty to fifty :(

[SuperApe]

Hmm. If there was a way to delete the material assignment in Ued, you'd be golden.
Maya looks like it's going to give you a material for every other object.

Wait! What if you specifically assigned the same material to both your object and collision object in Maya? When I'm messing around with material assignments, the export to Ued catches only those I've used. Perhaps Maya thinks you're using two different textures on those objects, so that's what it's exporting.

[King Mango]

hehe great minds think alike. Tried that. No this appears to be a bug. Erik de Neve says though that as long as you leave the extra material slot blank, it is not a performance issue. It's not elegant, but it's not a tax. So I'm ok with it for now. I've made suggestions to Maya to fix both this and to add support for vertex colors to the PLE UnEditor plug in. :D

[King Mango]

btw prolly wouldnt hurt for more people to ask about vertex colors support for the PLE exporter.

http://www.alias.com/cgi-bin/sug_forms/feature.cgi?product=MPLE

This way they will know that it is important.... Hopefully.

[SuperApe]

Erik de Neve says though that as long as you leave the extra material slot blank, it is not a performance issue. It's not elegant, but it's not a tax.
Good to know.
Thanks for the report.
Yeah, the more feedback they hear, the faster the fix happens.
There's thousands of people using this software, so you gotta speak up.