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I'm currently setting up a pipeline at my company where our animators are animating our characters in Maya, and we want to use the powerful Toon Shader for Eevee in Blender to texture the look dev models of our characters. So ideally, the animation for a character would be cached out of Maya, and that cache data would then be applied to a look dev version of that same character in Blender. Then final renders would be done with Eevee and sent to compositing.

I'm use to keeping this whole process within Maya, usually using a geocache to transfer animation from a character's animation scene to their final look dev render scene. But going from Maya to Blender has been difficult.

It doesn't look like there are any native cache data sets that can be exported from an animated mesh in Maya to an identical mesh in Blender. Alembic seems to bring in the character's geo with the animation, but the scale is off and I have no way of applying the toon shaders to this model. And it looks like there's an 'add modifier' option for my look dev character, but it only takes 'MDD' or 'PC2' point caches. I can't get either of these cache data codes out of Maya, but I'm not sure if there are plugins that could help with that?

We would really love to integrate Blender into our pipeline, so any advice would be greatly appreciated from the community!

Also if it helps, our current setup is getting a 3D model of our character from artists that made said model in blender, then bringing the FBX into Maya to rig and animate. That same model from the artist in blender is what is being used for the look dev file and getting the shaders/lighting applied.

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  • $\begingroup$ I am not sure if it helps, but you can try this 3dyuriki.com/2013/12/19/… $\endgroup$
    – Dmitry3024
    Commented Oct 11, 2020 at 19:37
  • $\begingroup$ Professional programs usually use the MDD format. To use this format, select "MDD" as format in the dropdown of the Mesh Cache modifier. $\endgroup$
    – jules
    Commented Oct 29, 2022 at 3:25

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MEL example

Convert a maya cache into pc2 format. The maya cache is named pSphereShape1.xml and located in c:/test/ directory.

cacheFile -pc2 0 -pcf "c:/test/mypc2.pc2" -f "pSphereShape1" -dir "C:/test/";

Furher reading: https://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2010help/Commands/cacheFile.html

"/" slash direction is important! Also you need to use "keep vert order" function when you import your .obj file in Blender. Otherwise you mesh will crash blender (but it will still have the animation). Then turn on the modifier:

enter image description here

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