Scene Conversion between 3dsmax and Maya Tutorial

Maya .FBX Import Options
Ok, lets go to the file menu and import our 3dsmax derived .FBX file. Just navigate your way to the 3dsmax7/meshes directory, or to any other directory you have exported the file to. You should see your file there, just click on it and hit Import.

FBX Importer
As you can see in the dialogue the first option we have is whether to bring in our animation (Take 001) or just bring in the static scene data (No Animation). In our case we want the animation to be brought in, so lets choose Take 001.

The next option is how the data should be brought in. In our case we want to preserver the render globals we have already setup, so we'll choose to Merge in the file.

We again have the option to set the interpolation sampling rate, remember that lower is higher fidelity, but will lead to a slower import of the data. In our case we'll stick with the same value as that used when exporting our file from 3dsmax i.e. 25.000.

Now that we have the import properties set they way we want them, lets go ahead and import the file. When you click on Import the dialogue will show its progress in the space below, giving us an idea as to how the import is progressing. Depending on what is being imported, this can take quite some time.

The imported Scene Scale
The first thing you may note when the file has imported is the large scale difference between 3dsmax and Maya. This can be adjusted somewhat using the system units value in Preferences/ Settings buy changing it to meters before importing. However if you do this, it may have issue down the line, and also the scene comes in at a rather small scale i.e. 100 times smaller than it would have been if the setting was centimeter. The exact scale match lies somewhere between, and so its probably best to leave this setting on its default of centimeters.

However another way of tackling the scale difference is by changing the scale of the Fbx_Root Null in Maya. This null is the parent of all of the objects that have been imported, and so changing its scale can be a quick way of bringing the two systems into a similar scale space. An example of a good value to use here would be 0.1 or in other words ten times smaller than when imported, this should get your two files back into a similar scale.

One thing to consider though when doing this is that if you now export your scene from Maya to .FBX and try to import it into 3dsmax, it will probably be 10 times smaller than it was when it was exported from 3dsmax in the first place. So for our example, we'll leave the Fbx_Root null with a scale of 1.0.

Maya Scene Objects
Ok, as you can see from the Outliner snapshot on the right we now have a number of objects in our Maya scene that match those present in the original 3dsmax scene. Our meshes as present as Teapot01, Geosphere01 and Torus_Knot01.

We can also see that our lights have imported as Omni01, Omni02 and Spot01. The target of Spot01 has imported into the scene as a Null called Spot01_Target .

Our camera has come in as Camera01 and its target has been imported as a Null called Camera01_Target.

Scene modifications to aid working
Due to our large Maya scene scale it may be a good idea to quick change some of our objects settings to make working with our scene a little smoother. The main thing to change is the Far Clip Plane of our perspective camera and our imported camera. By default both will now have values that are simply to small for our scene scale. I would suggest changing your Perspective cameras Far Clip Plane value to 10,000 and Camera01's value to 40,000.

Animation Transfer
Lets check out how Camera01's animation has transferred from 3dsmax. If you look at the Camera01 node you can see that the first issue is that it is looking at 90 degrees to the left of where it should be looking. We can fix this simply with a new aim constrain to the Camera01_Target Null. But first lets check out Camera01_Target .

In our original scene the camera target was animated along a path called line02. You can see in the Maya scene that line02 has been imported as a null, so its not really of much use to us, we can simply delete it plus any other line nulls. Worse than this though is that the export/import has striped away any animation that was on the camera target. So we will need to import that separately from 3dsmax now to get our full camera animation performance back.

Baking Animation of nodes in 3dsmax
In 3dsmax I have produced a small macroscript utility called BakeAnim to help with this process. Download and install the BakeAnim macro script provided here. Once installed, place it on one of your tools bars on 3dsmax and you can then use it from there when needed.

What we're going to do now is create a new null called CamTarget_Baked and transfer/bake the animation from the actual camera target on to it. We can then import this into our Maya file and use it for our cameras target. Lets quickly have a look at the tool, its actually pretty simple, it has four main elements..

Pick the Node
Press this button and then click on the object whose animation you wish to bake.

Pick Bake Target
Click on this button and this time pick the object in your scene that you want the animation baked on to.

Anim Start:
This value defines the start of the animation range to be baked

Anim End
This value defines the end of the animation range to bake.

Bake Animation
When you are happy with your settings, click on this button and the tool will quickly bake the objects and range you have defined.

Close
Just click on this if you wish to close the tool

Ok, so now we know how it works, lets use it. Create a new point helper and call it CamTarget_Baked. Then run the BakeAnim tool and use Pick the Node to define the cameras target. Then use Pick Bake Target to define the point helper we have just created. The Anim Start and Anim end parameters should be correctly set at 0 and 100 automatically, so just click on Bake Animation.

The tool quickly does its thing and we now have Camtarget_Baked with the same animation as the original camera target. We can then export this file as before using .FBX and we should have a new null in Maya called CamTarget_Baked, with the same animation. Another approach is to actually pick the camera target as the node and the target from the script and the tool will the simple bake the animation on the camera target itself, but I've shown you this method so can see that there is some flexibility in how this is handled. Ok, so lets pop back into Maya.