how to use maya object in android? [duplicate]

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

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.