Several other Autodesk products already have Datasmith exporters. Any chance we can get a Maya plugin at some point?
This comes up regularly in linear media workflows when we receive data from clients, and Dataprep doesn’t seem to run without a .udatasmith file import. Our only option currently is to have a a workaround for a very small handful of specialist artists using 3ds Max, which is difficult to maintain at scale.
Hello Nicholas, thank you for your question.
It is not in our plans to do that.
With growing support for scene format like USD or small contained asset like glTF that allows a decent transfer of information between DCC and UE there is a lower need to make a custom udatasmith exporter. Ideally we would prefer to rely only on industry standard formats.
However, we would be interested to hear what information, in your use case, does not transfer between Maya and UE. What things would you be able to do with a datasmith export that you cannot get through a USD or FBX export.
Regarding data preparation, with interchange you can make custom pipeline to perform some custom operation on import.
Regarding support of the Dataprep feature, at the moment it is set aside, but we slowly do steps to integrate it with Interchange. There is an experimental way to try and get the FBX, glTF or USD file format to go through the dataprep system.