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Maya Assets (Part 2 : Working With Existing Assets)

Posted: Sep 10, 2009
Category: Assets, Autodesk Maya, Usefultools

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Anyone out there remember Sigmund the Sea Monster? I know I'm dating myself here, but for those of you that don't remember... he was a character on a Saturday morning TV show back in the 70's.

I somehow ran across this on Netflix the other day and decided to throw it in the queue for my 4 year old daughter. Well it arrived today and I'm not sure who's more excited about watching it tonight... her or me? I'm sure it will not quite live up to my childhood memories. I was thinking though... how has someone -not- made a fully 3D feature length film based on Sigmund the Sea Monster yet??? Just remember... when they do make that film, you heard the prediction here :)

So for those of you that have been following my posts over the last few weeks you've probably noticed that I've got several different multi-part series going on right now. I did this in part so that I could shorten each post a bit. I figure it's a lot less of a commitment to come and check out a quick 5-10 minute demo movie than a full blown half hour. I was also hoping I could spark some interest and get you to come back for more :) Did it work?

Anyway... I've had a few requests to post the next part of the Assets demo series. So below is the second movie in a 3 part series about Maya Assets. In this demo I'll cover working with existing Assets, connecting Assets together via published nodes, as well as using Assets with file referencing.

If you haven't watch Part 1 yet you might want to check that out first ->

Maya Assets (Part 1 : Creating and Managing Assets)

Part 2 is below... Stay tuned for Part 3.

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Newest users comments View All 8 Comments

	Posted by STLR on Sep 22, 2010 at 03:54 PM
stevedavy - yes I was planning on posting a part3 for this but have not had a chance to record it. I will bump it up on my list of topics though. Thanks for the feedback.

	Posted by stevedavy on Sep 13, 2010 at 02:48 PM
Was there ever a part 3 of this? Also, I'd love to know exactly how you set up the missile switching. I don't quite follow your explanation and I'm not familiar with enum attributes. But, great tutorials!

	Posted by STLR on Oct 21, 2009 at 03:24 PM
FYI... Cory Mogk did a great post on the differences between Assets and Character Sets... area.autodesk.com/blogs/cory/what_s_the_difference_between_a_character_set_and_an_asset

Posted by STLR on Sep 14, 2009 at 02:22 PM

No, the missile swap part is nothing new really, as in a new feature. It's just meant to be an example of the kinds of things you can do to create custom setups. Basically what is happening in this part is that there is a hidden null node for each missile. Each of these nodes contains an enum attribute with a list of each missile type. Then there is a scriptJob (as you guessed) that monitors the state of each of these attrs so that if any of them are changed they will then trigger a scriptNode which actually contains the MEL required to swap out the referenced files accordingly.

One thing to point out though is that an Asset is actually used to consolidate and simplify all of this. There is an Asset/Container called "MissileSwap" that uses a selection redirect to make sure the user always selects the correct master node. The appropriate attributes (the enum attrs mentioned above) are then published to the container so that the user can access all of them at the same time from that master node.

	Posted by MorganLoomis on Sep 11, 2009 at 01:34 PM
Thanks for putting these up, it's very helpful for understanding the implementation of new features. I had a quick question about how you used attributes to swap the references: are you just using scriptJobs, or is that something fancy and new that I haven't heard about?