Copyright (C) 2010 Domingos Silva

MASSIVE TO MAYA VERSION 0.5 USER GUIDE

Massive Crowd Simulation

Massive Crowd Simulation inside Maya

Overview

Mass2maya is a Maya plug-in that let you import MASSIVE crowd

simulation inside Maya for rendering and adding more VFX. This plug-in
version only let you import all massive motion (including skeleton) without
geometry, texture and others. For each agents is created new binary Maya
file - that means if you have 100 agents inside massive you will have 100
Maya binary file.

Don’t worry with texture, light, camera manipulation inside MASSIVE. You
can do that in Maya.

If you use Maya 2008 find the most recent FBX version at
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=10775855

Quick Start

To import a massive scene, one can simply:

1. Open a massive scene and Ctrl+d to delete instances.

2. Go To Run->Sim on the top menu.

3. Set start frame and end frame.

4. In the OUTPUT section active sims, set path and choose type as fbx.
(If you don’t have any directory named Sim you must create. In this
example this directory is created in the same directory that have
massive scene, in other case you must specify full path).
If you have MASSIVE 3.03 export the sim file as maya ascii (ma) and
convert all using ma2fbx.mll plug-in in maya (pag. 6).

Path

5. Open a maya scene and load mass2maya.mll plug-in (using the Plug-in
Manager).
6. Import sim file exported from massive as fbx.

7. Attach the skeleton to geometry and edit the influence if necessary.

8. Save maya scene as maya binary file. In this step a character must
be read to render (attached to skeleton, textured, etc).

9. Repeat the step 1 to 4 with one change in step 1. Use Ctrl+p to place
agents. Optional Alt+m to make visible the geometry before Ctrl+p.

10. With mass2maya plug-in loaded type in MEL commands

mass2maya.mll and press enter. New window is showed.
11. Browse to the path specified in step 4 and select one of each fbx
files and press import (maya will still untouched before finish).

12. When maya finish working, create new maya scene.

13. Go to the path specified in step 4 and select all maya binary files
created and drag and drop into the new maya scene created. Play
the animation.
 - If you want to do any change in step 7, that affect all character you
must repeat steps 10 to 13.
- If your massive crowd simulation have different group you need to
repeat all steps if have different skeleton.

To convert ma sims to fbx:

1. Open a new maya scene and load ma2fbx.mll plug-in (using the Plug-
in Manager).

2. With ma2fbx.mll plug-in loaded type in MEL commands ma2fbx and

press enter. New window is showed.

3. Browse to sim directory and select one of each file and press
import. (wait maya finish).