Plan for Danny Ngan

Anyone who knows me and how I work knows that I prefer using Maya over 3DS Max for 3D animation tasks. That's why I am extremely excited about the beta release of the Maya2DTS exporter. I've been testing it out for a couple of weeks now, and it is really nice. With minimal effort and modification, I got my floursack from last year's IGC exported and running in the showtool.

Also, being the production workflow geek that I am, I started writing MEL scripts for the exporter as soon as Clark gave me an early version. What was originally several scattered scripts that were glorified macros has evolved into a full-fledged utility that I'm happy to say work quite well. I call it dtsUtility.


The dtsUtility is very similar to the Max DTS Export Utility in many ways -- similar button names, similar functions -- but I took it step further and added a couple niceties that don't exist in the Max utility. For example, there is a Sequence Manager that allows you quickly edit attributes for all sequences in your scene file in a single window. I also have a bounding box creator that orients the box correctly for Torque world space. I've got a few more things in mind, but those ideas will have to wait until I have a bit more time to work on it. For now, dtsUtility works just fine.

If anyone is interested in testing it out, please feel free to drop me a line and I'll send the script to you.