Maya scene unit conversion

[Mark Jackson]

So we have a carefully setup facial control board setup in cm's but needs to run it in a client scene set in meters, no problem right? Unfortunately because all the sliders are carefully setup with limits on the transforms of 0-1 when the scene comes into Maya in meters, all those transforms are recalculated and reset to 0.01, including all the transform limits.

All reasonable I guess, question is, is there a fast painless way of re-building or adjusting the rig to work with the new units yet still retain all of it's original transforms and limits?

Even if I scale, reset the limits and get it so that the transforms are driving 0-1 the final output node, which all the sliders drive, ends up with values of 100 unless I then disconnect all the final output values and force a unitConversion node in there too.

Must surely be a better way, been a long day!

thanks

 

Mark

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Mark Jackson
CEO / Technical Director
red9consultancy.com

[Marcus Ottosson]

How about using the rig in a scene set to cm, and post-compensate scale globally either during or after export? If the rig must be used in a scene with an environment, would it be possible to scale the environment to compensate during animation? I've had good experiences with controlled compensation like these in cases where there was either little control on one end (such as being a cloth artist working with an oversized animation rig), or when a significant development effort was required to conform one to the other (as in your case).

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[Mark Jackson]

We ended up writing conversion code that goes through the current facial rig and adds in scale nodes above the controllers to allow the translate 0-1 range to be correct, but then you have to unplug and re-plug all the hooks to the resulting nodes to force Maya to generate the unitConversion nodes. Without doing this you end up with a slider outputing 0-1, and the node it's directly connected too getting 0-100. The problem is the setup has to work in Maya, in a scene now in meters, and all the controllers respecting their 0-1 ranges as it's to be run with a Faceware solver.

We just were just caught out a little by just how much Maya changes the setup when you simple change the units. All good now 

cheers

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