Rendering Maya animation on Android?

Question

I've been able to import 3D models from Maya into OBJ files, which in turn, are read by my Android app. This model can now be displayed and I can apply transformations on them as well, even on high-polygon count objects, which is nice.

The next step is to figure out if there's any reasonable way to display animation defined within Maya. I really have no clue how to approach this and my initial research on this essentially came up empty.

Has anyone attempted this before? If so, how would this work?

Answer 1

Unlike Cody Hatch's answer, I'm interested in this too. This is my theory as to come about animating a model:

Lets say your model has 30 frames. One way would be to export each frame as an individual OBJ model. From there, you can possible make a folder for those 30 OBJs. So now you have 31 files total. If the person hits a button, the trick would be to load each OBJ in order according to the length of time the button (or whatever action) is valid. and if it lasts over 1 second (30 frames), loop back to the beginning.

The only problem with this theory is that it would most-likely be resource and power intensive, not to mention, a space hog if you try to load a lot of things into one scene.

Answer 2

I think it's worth noting that this question has little or nothing to do with Maya. Maya's file formats are proprietary and opaque; you will NOT find a way to directly display them on Android (or anywhere else, come to that). But you can export data from Maya to (basically) any format, which is what you actually want to do.

So, here's the process:

1. Figure out how you're going to display 3D models and animations on Android
2. Figure out how to get stuff from Maya into the format your answer from step 1 requires.

There's a lot of ways to do step 1. For sheer ease of use I'd probably go for Unity myself. Basically it's game development tool that can create 3D apps and games that run on Android (and iOS, OSX, Windows, etc.) It's not free - the Android addon costs $400 - but if you're actually planning on doing anything serious with Android, you'll find it worthwhile. With it, it's actually pretty trivial to make a little Android app in Unity that displays an animated model (and a LOT of 3D Android and iOS games are made in Unity). Unity also wants models and animations in FBX format, which is a widely supported interchange format - you'll have no problems getting stuff out of Maya into FBX.

If you've gone with Unity in step 1, then step 2 is trivial: Export your models from Maya as FBXes, and you're done. If you've decided to roll your own Android rendering app, well, good luck. :)

Anyhow, the point is that what you want to do is find a generic solution for rendering animated models on Android, and only then figure out how to get your content out of Maya.

Answer 3

Instead of outputting each individual frame to a separate obj file like spicyweenie suggests, why not export just keyframes to obj files. Implement interpolation in your code in order to fill in the missing frames. If your models are complex, you'll probably want to cache the interpolated models in memory, but at least you don't have to load them all from files too.