Does the format support (or are there plans to support) the “lattice” concept, such as employed by Maya?
I am not familliar with the “lattice” concept.
Can someone explain ?
its a free form deformation which consists of three things within maya, the FFD node (controls the deformation), a base lattice (basically a cube defining a region of space that will be deformed) and the deformed lattice (some 3D grid of points whose default pose is co-incident with the base lattice, however moving it’s CVs away from this will distort any geometry contained within the original shape).
I wrote some notes a while ago that explains how to extract the data from maya
http://www.robthebloke.org/research/maya/mfnlattice.htm
As soon as lattices are added to the spec i can easily make changes to the maya exporter to extract this data (it’s only a couple of hours work)
The only real caveat, is that max supports EFFD’s (Extended FFD’s) that allow you to use other shapes such as cylinders etc. That may slow down the definition of these things in the file format spec.