Yeah, it's totally annoying you can't load a lowpoly model into shake, like you can with digital fusion, so you can see WTF is going on with the multiplane node. You can import Locators, though - here's a quick script that converts a proportion of the polygonal vertices in a maya scene to locators (set the step value to 1 to do every vertex, 2 for 50%, etc, it will only work on selected shape nodes). However, this didn't work as well as I was hoping - it's fine with about 10 locators, but with 100 it just crashes my shake. Lame. Anyone got a better idea?
[codebox]// point cloud exporter v0.01
$step = 1;
$allObjects = ls -sl -type mesh;
int $nObjects = size($allObjects);
int $i = 0;
for ($i; $i < $nObjects; $i++)
{
print $i;
string $obj = $allObjects[$i]; // work out the name of the current obj
print $obj;
select $obj; // select it
int $nVerts[] = `polyEvaluate -v`; // count its vertices
int $j = 0;
for ($j; $j < $nVerts[0]; $j += $step)
{
// select the current vert
vector $pos = `eval ("pointPosition -w " + $obj + ".vtx[" + $j + "]")`;
string $name = ("pointCloudLocator\_" + $i + "\_" + $j);
float $x = $pos.x;
float $y = $pos.y;
float $z = $pos.z;
spaceLocator -n $name;
scale 0.05 0.05 0.05;
move $x $y $z;
}
}[/codebox]