Question about COLLADA plugin for Maya

The following is a mail conversation I had with Christian (working on the importer/exporter for Collada in Maya)
… that I thought I should post here since it can be very helpful for others. :slight_smile:

Mikael,

    Thank you for your interest. I suggest that you post this on the

public Collada forum, since it would be of interest to others too.

> I’m working on a collada reader, as part of my thesis project, in java
> using JAXB (Java-to-XML-binding) to create classes from the schema, a 3d
> real-time API (in Java) to display the objects and scenegraph structure
> and Maya 6.0 to model the scene.

    I'm only testing on Maya 6.0.1 and 6.5. If you have 6.0, I strongly

recommend you upgrade to 6.0.1, it’s a free upgrade anyway.

> I need to export attributes from the “Extra attributes” information you
> can set for each object/shape in Maya.
> Is this possible from the exporter?

    Not implemented yet, but it's in the plan. 

> I’m not sure how to get the export UI options panel to work. The script
> file is within the script catalogue in the Maya installation directory but
> it does not seem to work and nothing happens when I run it from the script
> editor. This is not a huge problem right now since I can run the exporter
> from the MEL command line.

No one else has reported that problem. There’s probably something strange
happening with your plug-in path. Check your Maya.env, verify that there is
no duplicate of COLLADA.mll left around. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have
the time to provide end-user support on this plug-in.

> How is the the data for the <modified> element exported. I’m getting
> parsing errors on my XML readers since the date format seems to be
> different than expected. This could be defined different from an xs:date
> type and how java defines their java.util.Date conversion. However the
> parsing works if I add an extra zero to the time value ( for example T9:42
> to T09:42). This is not a huge issue though but I though I should mention
> it since it can be a bug in the exporter.

Yes, this was an actual bug. Thanks for reporting it. It will be fixed in
the next release.

> Keep up the good work and hopefully you will be seeing COLLADA do some
> useful stuff in a month or two (hopefully)! :slight_smile:

Good luck on your side. If you still can’t get the plug-in to load properly
in the Maya UI, I would suggest posting on the public Collada forum. Maybe
others have had a similar problem and will have the time to help you. Sorry
I can’t be more helpful,

Christian

If you still have the script problem after you’ve updated to 6.0.1, please read the following:

There was a problem with the installation batch file. Basically, the mel scripts need to be copied in the scripts/others folder, not “scripts/unsupported”. You can get the latest plug-in from sourceforge, it should have the fix.

Some people also reported that doing a “rehash” in the script editor helped.

If more people get this problem, let me know.