Maya AssemblyTuesday, August 21, 2012 10:31 AM

The new Scene Assembly tool added in the Maya 2013 Extension is a great production friend tool that enables artists to see data within their viewport as desired by the artistes at the same time utilise graphic resources optimally. For example we have an extremely heavy scene or set of objects the choices we have is 1) Wireframe 2) Shaded 3) Shaded & textured 4) Shaded textured & light However, the final look is best seen in viewport 2.0 with option 4 above. This has come a long way and delivers render quality right within the viewport. However, when scene get to the size of GB's it is near impossible to interact with the scene...there by the need of 1) Displaying as Bounding Box 2) Loading/unloading Reference 3) Making GPU cache of objects that do not need to be edited This works pretty good. But what if one needs the flexibility to use either or the above...that too not on the entire scene, but on the object he selectsThere is comes Scene Assembly.

To create a Scene Assembly :

This creates the Scene Assembly with a simple locator

Scene Assembly Page 1

We can then add in the scene representation that we want as well as a cache Cache Representation

Select the Assembly from the outliner...and in the Attribute editor add the Scene representation

Scene Assembly Page 2

Similarly we can add the Cache representation Of course, the Cache has to be done earlier.We can even add more than one type of representation. Hence instead of having the entire scene to be viewed as bounding box...we can also have the same as a scene representation.

Provided of course we have created the same (using convert geometry to Bounding Box) and saved this as a separate file.

Scene Assembly Page 3

Hence we now have our Scene Assembly

An important point to note

The representation on the top of the list is the one that will show up first...hence very important when getting referenced into a large scene. Select the Assembly for the outliner and export this selection as a maya file

We can extend the Scene Assembly to be utilised as a par of a "referencing workflow". First of all we have to make the assembly as a proper object to be recognised by Maya. Hence a simple export selection as a scene file will do the trick.To create an Assembly Reference :

Scene Assembly Page 4

Selected the exported Scene Assembly file

Above image is of 9 Assembly references...which show up a 0 vertices, as all of these are GPU cache

Scene Assembly Page 5

All the Assemblies changed to Bounding Box...some of them a 1 single bounding box...others having all their "subobjects" also being bounding boxes.

All Geometry loaded

Scene Assembly Page 6

Hence the viewport from 0 vertices to 25+ lakh vertices

Of Course the key idea is to be able to represent within the scene what one wants, be it a fully details object, or low detail, or bounding box, or Cache or locators or none

Digitally signed by Prem Moraes DN: cn=Prem Moraes, o=Autodesk, ou=M&E, email=prem.moraes@autodesk.c om, c=IN Date: 2012.08.31 14:37:54 +05'30'

Scene Assembly Page 7