MDD animation Speedtree and animation in general best practices

[ragnoru]

Hi there,
I am working on a show that needs different time of day for a beach setup with  some wind in some palm trees that we have generated in Speedtree I think for that ther is no better software than Terragen! I was looking around for a solution that was not  "make an OBJ sequence" to bring in the wind from speedtree and came across the new MDD import functionality in terragen, just to discover that SpeedTree has removed the MDD export, now they only support MCC MCX and PC2 and of course Alembic.
The question is, are MCC easy to convert to MDD? Is it something a script can do?
I have not been able to find apps that really want to naturally export MDD since Alembic has been taking over the point cache world, are there separate apps that could do this conversion to MDD.
Obj sequence can be very heavy and hard to troubleshoot, so any help would be much appreciated.
Are we looking at any alembic import feature for the next release?
Cheers

[WAS]

Their documentation must be behind cause their export page only lists '.MC', '.MDD', and '.PC2' for point data. 

I did find a tut to convert pc2 to mdd: http://users.skynet.be/fc508872/PC22MDD/index.html

[ragnoru]

Their documentation must be behind cause their export page only lists '.MC', '.MDD', and '.PC2' for point data. 

Looks like it was from a previous version of the documentation, that is why it got pretty confusing, I do feel that the addition of alembic will seriously boost the usefulness of terragen awesome landscape rendering.
The new documentation for Speedtree just glosses over the export https://docs8.speedtree.com/modeler/doku.php?id=expstaticmesh

[rolland1013]

I am running into this exact same problem. I've done several projects where I've exported an animated Speedtree asset in FBX format, imported it into Maya to create an obj sequence. But this is a long and drawn-out process, which includes having to rename all the shader nodes within Maya. Obviously, this is a hugely time consuming, especially for bigger projects with lots of Speedtree assets.
I think it's great that TG supports MDD motion caches, but it's equally not great (and frustrating) that Speedtree has stopped supporting it.
The link WAS posted above no longer works. Is there a better link?
Another question is; even if I can get a currently supported Speedtree cache file converted to an MDD, how do I use it? The file was created for the exported FBX model. Will it work for an OBJ file?

[Kevin Kipper]

In regards to using the mdd file, you would assign it to the OBJ Reader node's "Read MDD file" parameter found under the Mesh Modifiers tab.  

Here's the documentation link:
https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=OBJ_Reader#Mesh_Modifiers_Tab

I would also image that the geometry's point order of the two files would need to be the same, ie. the source FBX file the MDD was created from and the OBJ file it's being applied to.  

[digitalguru]

@rolland1013

My script Terraman, will help you, check it out at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bjougu2Ss0&list=PLm8w7fdcRUoKGFggtnUVWdXec4OQXT063
(at 1:36)

walkthru of the object export:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbx0JRDC6k&list=PLm8w7fdcRUoKGFggtnUVWdXec4OQXT063&index=8

Terraman can export animated/deforming geo from Maya as an .obj and associated MDD cache. It will also translate shaders to Terragen (works best with Arnold shaders).
It will export the whole setup as a clip file which you can then just import into Terragen.

[rolland1013]

The latest Terraman looks great. I just downloaded it, and am going through your walkthrough. I am running into a problem, though. As a test, I animated a simple sphere in Maya, grouped it, then tried to ADD SCENE OBJECT in the Terraman window. But nothing happens? As instructed, I relaunched Maya.
Any ideas?

[digitalguru]

Hi Rolland1013,

Thanks for your purchase of Terraman!

From your screenshot it looks like you didn't hit "Create World" iin the main world tab. Even if you don't plan to import a terrain, this creates all the nodes to store data - in this instance it will create nodes to store the object data.

Terraman prints out messages in the script editor, so watch out for those to prompt you through - here it would have printed: "Terraman: A World Group must be created."

You can decide on a working scale prior to creating a World, usually 1:100 is a good start - where 1 unit = 1 meter and the script will scale the exported anim back to Terragen at the right scale.

Feel free to PM me if you have any other questions