Creating Collision Volumes with Maya

From Multiverse

Creating collision volumes with Maya requires some extra care because Maya has a naming issue that 3ds Max doesn't. This procedure follows that of the Platform Tutorial, but is generally applicable.

NOTE: The following collision volume creation is specific to Static objects and does not apply to animated models. The areas for creating collision volumes in 3dMax should be accessed to understand the differences involved.

Follow these steps to create a collision volumes with Maya:

1. Load in the model into your tool. The following figure shows the wishbone house in Maya:

2. Create a polygon primitive cube (a box). Resize it and shape the cube to fit a portion of the current structure like the floor. To avoid a non-uniform scale issue, use the scale and rotate tools on the object level. Do not freeze rotational transforms, so the axis always aligns properly. Repeat this process until all important surfaces have a collision volume associated with them.

3. Name the collision volumes. Note: Maya names objects in a special way. If you look in the outliner or the hypergraph (places where items are commonly renamed), the mesh would seem to be called "human_wishbone_house."

This is not the case however. Maya names its initial node of the object (the transform node) with the name you give it. It then looks at the shape node (or mesh node) and appends "shape." So the actual name of the mesh becomes "human_wishbone_houseshape." You can see this in the channels box:

So, you must name your collision volumes to include the "shape" name that Maya adds to the mesh description node; so, in this example a collision volume might be "mvcv_obb_human_wishbone_houseshape_01."