Plug-in, Nebula-out. Get it?

I’ve been hard at work getting a Nebula 3 plugin for Maya to have all the features we’d want. Why you may ask, isn’t the pipeline awesome as it is? Well, the answer is no, no it isn’t. It works, but it is far from smooth, and the Nebula plugin aims to address that. The plugin is currently only for Maya, but there will be a Motion Builder version as well. The plugin basically just wrap FBX exporting, and makes sure it’s suitable for Nebula by using a preset included with the Nebula distribution. It also runs the FBX batcher which converts the fbx-file to the model files and mesh files. It can also preview the mesh if it’s exported, and will export it if it doesn’t exist already. This allows for immediate feedback how the model will look in Nebula. It also tries preserve the shader variables, but it’s impossible to make it keep the material. That’s because DirectX doesn’t support setting a vertex layout with a vertex shader with a smaller input than the layout. This is a problem because converting a skin from static to skinned will cause Nebula to crash, seeing as the material is preserved between exports. So the plugin offers a way to get meshes, including characters, directly to Nebula, which is very nice indeed.

I’ve also been working with getting a complete Motion Builder scene into Nebula, and I actually got Zombie to work with all features. This means the skin, along with more than one animation clip (yay) can be loaded into Nebula seamlessly by simply saving the Motion Builder file and running the exporter. I will probably make a Nebula 3 plugin for Motion Builder as well, so we can have the exact same export and preview capabilities as in Maya.

I know I have been promising a video showing some of the stuff we’ve done, but I just haven’t had the time! Right now, I will start working on the documentation for our applications so there are clear directions for anyone who wish to use them (mainly our graphics artists here at Campus) . The plugin already redirects from Maya to three different HTML docs, each of which will describe the different tools. That’s nice and all, except for the fact that the HTML docs are completely empty.