Reading polygon meshes from *.ma file

[futurcraft]

Hi,

Can anybody provide some advice on how to collect information&henceforth create a list of polygon meshes  from an existing Maya ascii file without opening the file in Maya UI. I suppose this can be done using a MEL script by selecting the location of the maya file and then expanding the script's capability from the information obtained from the list of contents of the maya ascii file.

Thanks in advance,

Nik.

[joojaa]

ls -type mesh;

Or are you possibly asking how to use mayabatch?

However you may need to elborate a bit. Because running a maya batch session just to list the meshes is a bit wastefull. You can simply read the data directly form the ma file quite easily even without involving the whole maya runtime.

Or do you really want to parse a maya ascii file with mel, well thing  i do NOT suggest you do that. Its not what mel is intended for. Sure you can regexp match the locations but still theres lot of unitentianal convolution in a real case.

Incidenttaly if your looking into replicating a import selected functionality, then no its not really easy you would need to do a lot of work and it would still not work out very well. Its been attempted about 20 times, its not trivial since maya doesnt really work in way that would make this easy.

[futurcraft]

Hi Jooja,

Thank you for your reply. Yes I was thinking of coding an import selected type of functionality. By the sound of your advice I figure it would be best to build my pipeline in such a way that I save individual files of specific assets and then import them in using my script.

Really appreciate the help.

Cheers,

Nik.