embedding attributes into .obj in Maya...or Max Is it possible?

SahakSahakian

Hi.

I wonder if there is a way to add attribute such as building height or roof type onto footprint .obj files from within Maya or Max?

How does one go about adding an attribute that City Engine can read/show and be usable like shown in the tutorial files?

Does it have to be in shape format? And if there are other software that allow for adding this attribute before importing?

Is there tutorials that show how one can add building height attribute to a polygonal building footprint before importing to City Engine?

EDIT: I did some searching and found out that these attributes live in an external to the polygons database, table.dbf file. Is there scripts or exporters that anyone is aware of that allows these attributes ( buildingHeight, buildingType ) to be added and exported from within Maya, Max, Sketchup?

Thank you.

MatthiasBuehler1

To get the building height, I'd rather set up a script which calculates the meshes bounding box.

Polys with holes would not be supported.

I've written some MEL code which gets a vertex list of one polygon with which you can directly create a corresponding shape in CityEngine.

That could be a starting point. You'd have to continue using the output of this, then go on and create the text for CityEngine python code.

float $resultArray[] = `getFaceVertexCoordList("polySurface1" )`;
print $resultArray;

global proc float[] getFaceVertexCoordList(string $shapeName)
{
    float $resultArray[] = {};
    string $ftv[] = `polyInfo -faceToVertex ($shapeName+ ".f[0]")`;
    
    string $buf[];
 $numTokens = `tokenize $ftv[0] ":" $buf`;
 $numTokens = `tokenize $buf[1] " " $buf`;
    
    for ($element in $buf)
    {
        float $coords[] = `xform -ws -q -t ($shapeName + ".vtx[" + int($element) +"]")`;
        $resultArray[size($resultArray)] = $coords[0];
        $resultArray[size($resultArray)] = $coords[1];
        $resultArray[size($resultArray)] = $coords[2];
    }
    return $resultArray;
}

Note that this obviously only works if the input mesh has just 1 face.