I was just wondering if i'm one of the few I hear of that does "Peice by Peice" modeling. I mean everyone may do it like that, but I don't know. Basically I've made a library of over 200 body parts in Maya. What I do is I mix and match these body parts to create whatever it is I want. Then I edit it to add details. I was wondering if there is a plugin for Maya unlimited 7.0 that will allow me to easly peice them together. I have been peiceing them together manual with maya for a long time now and it's becomeing quite time consuming. I have heard of this program called Creature Creator which allows me to do just that and was wondering what everyone else thought of it or if they have anything else they could suggest. Thank you in advance.

Prhaps you could write something in mel that would have a little easy to use importer? So you don't have to take as much time going through menu's and such? Or do you mean something that would actually stitch the bodyparts together?

something to actually stitch the parts together.. it's getting rather tedious doing it over and over lol

ah, in which case, finding a program capable of doing it, liek the one you stated, might be best. Unless you want to go through all your models and make them intercompatible on the vertice level, which might take weeks to compare and edit 200 models!

Edit: how about this? it's the new version of creature creator: http://www.fxrealm.com/products/creaturelab/index.htm

also might you know where to get a b3d importer/exporter plugin (free) for maya 7.0?

I don't think there is one, but they can both use dxf or obj. Also, creature lab is no longer a plugin, and is standalone.

ya i know it's a standalone now, but it still allows me to import and export to it and back to maya for detailing.. i was asking for a b3d import/export plugin for TREEMagik. I grew old of making trees manually so I desided to use that instead, because it's much quicker and my MMORPG team only consists of 2 people (me and my GF) lol

styleMaker, which allows you to create clothing for There, has done this for a while.

What helps a lot is to create all the "body parts" in a specific orientation space, so that you know what goes where. It also helps to define specific ring vertices that have to be at the interface between each different piece. Last, it helps to run a pass of auto-welding after the piecing-together is completed, because you probably didn't get all the vertices and weights exactly coincident.

Beware the texture UV splits; they'll create lots of extra verts when you do this. If you can automatically generate a parameterization, that'll save you verts (and possible make your tangent spaces smoother, too).