I’ve been working on a Maya equivalent to the 3DS Max Pivot Painter Tool, as there currently isn’t one available.
Prepping Maya Paint FX grass for unreal engine wind animation:
The tool works and has a limited set of features right now, which include:
Vertex Animation Falloff - Alpha channel vert colour, controls the amount of animation applied to each vertex.
Auto Pivot Detect - Calculates the correct pivot position of each sub mesh, storing the pivot values into the UV channels used by the PivotPainter nodes in Unreal Engine 4.
UV Bias Pivot - If you have unwrapped your mesh with the base verts aligned, you can use UV Bias Pivot to process meshes faster.
Combine and split meshes after process - choose if the final resulting mesh should be combined, split, grouped etc.
I would love to release the tool right now, but I’m in the process of re-writing from pyMel to a C++ plugin for great increases in calculation speed. I also want to add a lot more features, such as hierarchy pivots (for trees) and more weighting controls. I would really like to know what features of the 3DS Max Painter tool people have been using, or which features seem most appealing. If you have an idea for a feature that isn’t in the existing version of the tool set, then please suggest it and I might be able to include it. I will be releasing this tool for free to everyone once its at a releasable stage.
