I have just started using Maya Personal Learning addition to familiarize myself with the program. I would like to import a dxf but am having troubles. When I go to file > import, one of the file type options is .dxf. I choose this and click on my file. Everything seems to go as it should except it appears that nothing is imported. The screen is still black. Can anyone help?
QUOTE(tresselk @ 05/08/08, 06:28 AM) [snapback]285223[/snapback]
I have just started using Maya Personal Learning addition to familiarize myself with the program. I would like to import a dxf but am having troubles. When I go to file > import, one of the file type options is .dxf. I choose this and click on my file. Everything seems to go as it should except it appears that nothing is imported.
Well theres a few things you should know about dxf ad maya in order to understand this fenomenon.
First DXF, dxf is a quite wast and incompatible format. In fact totally valid dxf quite regularly does not get loaded into dxf supporting programs quite across board. Ive so far seen 17 different interpretations of how dxf is suposed to work. Needless to say only 1 of them is ever supposed to work. But At at the end spectrum quite number of them may work out unexpected wayss. So Dxf itself is highly unreliable.
Second dxf contain a number of dataelements maya doe snot support. So you must import stuff maya actually supports.
Then maya end.
Maya screen is small, for engineering purposes infinitesimally tiny. So odds are if you get something imported correctly you wont see it. You should for this reason frame the image by hitting a. But catch 12 here is that sure it made teh camera frame whats there but you still see nothing (keep your eye on the default grid), Now if you frame and the grid dissapears it tells you that indeed there si something but its huge. so you need to pump up the near and far clip planes of the camera.
QUOTE
The screen is still black.
Well maya screen shouldn't be black, unless you set it to e be black mostly this tells you you have a driver problem.
Maya shoudl be gray witha grid visible if not you have aincompatible gfx card.
PS: if you find this data thing weird then i have news for you. While in 2d graphics things usually export spiffy dory form app to app this does NOT hold true in 3d applications. In fact getting things imported and exported form one source to another is more or less the exception to the rule. The rule being that it dont export if it does it didn't the way you intended.
And if theres sucha import export neutral format that works well DXF is allmost certainly not it.
DXF is terrible
Many times when I import models (no matter what the format) they come in extremely large and need to be scaled way down.