In 2002/2003 I worked at Wootsoft and participated in the creation of a MMORPG called "Iritor" (which unfortunately never got released). From time to time I had to work in the tools- and especially the Maya-plugins-area. As every game, we needed to extract the most basic information out of Maya:

• the mesh itself. This includes its name, the triangles and the vertices with their positions, normals, skin-weights, UV-sets, etc.
• the skeleton: every animated mesh was bound to a skeleton.
• the animation. We used skeleton- keyframe animation, and hence needed the transformation of each skeleton at each keyframe.

As we already had a working solution ¹ a maya-exporter wasn't essential, but we would have liked to have our own.

After some fruitless hours searching good documentation I finally came to the following discouraging conclusion: Writing an exporter for Maya doesn't seem very difficult, as long as you know how to do it. And: There's virtually no documentation on the net.

We therefore decided to stick with the old solution, and attack the exporter only once we had more time. Unexpectedly I did find this time: After one year at Wootsoft I returned to France to finish my last year of studies. There every student needed to work on a industrial project. I was allowed to do the exporter.

As I was really disappointed by the lack of documentation (be it well documented exporters, or tutorials) I emphasized the reusability of the exporter. This meant well documented code, pluggable code-parts, and a documentation. Eventhough Wootsoft unfortunately ceased to exist before I had finished the exporter, I continued working on it, and reached a satisfying result in the summer of 2004.

This document finishes my initial goal by providing the last missing part: a good documentation / tutorial. (well. At least I hope it's "good";)

---

¹: We exported our models using MS's X-exporter, and then extracted the information out of the X-files.