Importing Massive Simulation to Maya

[Sumit Neupane]

Hello Everyone,

I am an final year computer animation student at Teesside university and My final year project is based on crowd simulation in massive. I learnt about massive to do the sim but not the problem is that I cannont bring back the sim to maya because we got massive 4 at university and no plugin like new version to bring it back. I knew that it doesn't allow exporting the geo along with simulation but I thought I will use massive Importer( https://github.com/redpawfx/massiveImporter) to bring sim to maya. Is there any more importer around to do the task? I tried to make massive importer work but It wouldn't work. Has anyone tried to make it work on more recent versions? Can you please suggest some way forward from here?
Thank you for your time. :)

kind regard,
sumit

[finale...@gmail.com]

the massive importer you mentioned is a good start.
as I recall, a couple of bug fixings can make it work.

you can also search in github, I think there are some interesting projects about bringing massive
simulated results back into maya.

but be careful, those projects might ceased because there is an official massive maya plugin.

I used to read the source code of massive importer and implemented my own importer before.

if you want to write your own importer to import the massive simulated results,
first, you will have to understand .cdl file structure, the massive manual is a good start.

in cdl file, there is a part about the joints position and orientation in rest pose,
you will have to parse this part and build the whole joint hierarchy in maya.
this might takes some time to figure it out, because massive save the joint information in
a different way, you can search massive manual and their official forum for more detail.

the massive manual also mentions the skinning weight format, it's easy to understand,
and also easy bringing back to maya.

next, the simulated act files( the ascii one ), you will have to read info of
joints' position and orientation per frame and apply them to the joint hierarchy which you just built.

the most important thing is to figure out the difference between massive agent joint and maya joint.
once you figure it out, the rest is just using python to parse text files.
the source code of massive importer you mentioned can enlighten you a lot.

I am sorry I can't provide you more detail, because I don't have the source code I wrote before,
since I have already left the studio where I built the massive pipeline.

good luck!

[Sumit Neupane]

Thank you so much. I will definitely have more look into the plugin but I am just starting with maya python api so I doubt that I will be able to spot the bug. I will definitely do what you suggested.This plugin spits out 2 errors, 1 is script editor which looks like

msvSimImport -masFile "D:/test_crowd/crowd/sim_test.mas" -simType "amc" -simDir "D:/test_crowd/crowd/sim" -callsheet "D:/test_crowd/crowd/callsheet.cal" -loadGeometry 1 -loadSegments 1 -loadMaterials 1 -skinType "smooth" -animType "curves" -materialType "blinn" -instanceSegments 1 -frameStep 1 -cacheGeometry 0;

# Error reading AMC file: D:/test_crowd/crowd/sim/female.1.amc

# Error reading simulation: D:/test_crowd/crowd/sim

and another in output window, which looks like 

Could not find maya.utils._guiExceptHook.

Invalid Python Environment: Python is unable to find Maya's Python modules

Python Environment:

  PYTHONHOME is not set.

  PYTHONPATH = ;C:/MsvTools/scripts;C:/Program Files/Autodesk/mentalrayForMaya2014/scripts/AETemplates;C:/Program Files/Autodesk/mentalrayForMaya2014/scripts/mentalray;C:/Program Files/Autodesk/mentalrayForMaya2014/scripts/unsupported;C:/Program Files/Autodesk/mentalrayForMaya2014/scripts;C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2014/substance/scripts

  Could not find the site module

  Search path (sys.path):

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin

    C:\MsvTools\scripts

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\mentalrayForMaya2014\scripts\AETemplates

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\mentalrayForMaya2014\scripts\mentalray

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\mentalrayForMaya2014\scripts\unsupported

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\mentalrayForMaya2014\scripts

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\substance\scripts

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin\python27.zip

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\DLLs

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\lib

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\lib\plat-win

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\lib\lib-tk

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\lib\site-packages

    C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin\python27.zip\lib-tk

    C:/Users/sumit/Documents/maya/2014-x64/prefs/scripts

    C:/Users/sumit/Documents/maya/2014-x64/scripts

    C:/Users/sumit/Documents/maya/scripts

    C:/MsvTools/plug-ins/../python

This error only shows up with this plugin, I tried other python plugins but they work fine. Would you be able to tell if there is any problem with the search path ?
thank you so much for your time. I will keep posting on how it goes. :)

kind regards,

sumit