How can i load OBJ sequence to softimage?

[piotrek255]

Hi

I need to load a OBJ sequence, so i can bake this animation to one big file instead of many OBJ models.
How can i do that in softimage? I dont want to use realflow plugin for this.

[xsisupport]

Use Tim Crowson's multi-importer. Here's a version I modified to do it with drag and drop:
http://xsisupport.com/2012/10/09/importing-multiple-fbx-files-with-drag-and-drop/

[piotrek255]

thanks, but it imports all OBJs, one OBJ is 20mb, the animation is 200 frames long. I need something that would load/unload OBJ files every frame with the ability to cashe the whole animation to one file preserving clusters and UV's (which are of course the same for all OBJ's, only point position changes), i cant find anything like that for softimage.

[rray]

This "should" work:
Use the multi import and then the Point Oven Baker to convert the individual objects to an MDD sequence.
This you can import and play as an animation.

[piotrek255]

i tried that, i selected 5 meshes separately and exported MDD files, then i created a box and loaded the files but nothing showed up, i got this error:

' INFO : Point Oven: Error! Different point counts
' INFO : debug. globals loaded

[rray]

Ok it seems this isn't workable.. Point Oven Baker looks like it doesn't process the list as individual frames, but just exports existing animation on the list objects as MDD.

Does the tool where you generated the obj files have an MDD option?

[piotrek255]

i use ONYX, to generate my tree animation, from the point oven i can only export LWO files, i just tried it just now and the trees have no animation.

PS: can i use point oven to copy animation between objects? for example copy transformation curves from one object to another

[druitre]

Remember MDD is a pointcacheformat, it does nothing more than store each point's position on each frame for selected meshes.

That said, I think mdd is a simple ASCII textformat, so you could try and create one for one of your meshes for all of your frames, then create one for each of your objects for each object's frame, open them in notepad or similar and make your own combination of the two. It depends on each OBJ having the exact same pointcount/pointorder. UV's and stuff are not stored in the MDD but in the OBJ, so that should remain working.

EDIT: when loading it back, it has to be on one of your OBJ's, otherwise it won't make sense to pointoven - loading onto a box will always give you that error message. Think of it as storing shapes on an object, a shape makes sense only in relation to that specific object.

[Bullit]

That is strange Softimage can export Obj sequence but can't import...

There is a maxscript to load obj sequence, i don't know how it is feasible to use it to make a version for softimage. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/objloader-v1-4

[rray]

Could you try this addon? Here's how it would work: First import all meshes into softimage (Probably with that a high numer of meshes/polys, not having a viewport open will help with that).

After that select all those meshes in the explorer, and pick menu "Export->Point Oven from selected objects".

Once that's finished, you can make a new scene, import the first obj and apply the MDD.

[piotrek255]

I managed to import whole tree from onyx as one object with LWO, but all of the animation frames have the same name when i multi import them(i dont know if that matters when exporting MDD), more importantly , i think the trees have different topology between frames... heres an error after running the script:

' WARNING : Object OnyxTREE has an point count different than that of the first selected object (166680), skipping.

There is a plugin for 3dmax called treestorm made by Onyx, but it isnt available for XSI. As far as i know, treestorm is the only way to create proxy animation from OnyxTree, i dunno why they didnt make it for softimage.