Maya animations to MDDs in modo

David Stripinis, a 3D expert and avid modo user, has worked with James Cameron on Avatar, and more recently at Double Negative. Back in 2006 David wrote a script called modomotionApply.py which allowed users to import animations from Maya into modo, as a mesh with MDD file. This was a freely available plug-in and unfortunately, after complaints from the community about it not being fully supported, David gave up and discontinued any further work on it. 

Fortunately for me, during my 3D animation subject I managed to download modomotion only a few days before he shut down the modomotion website. Needless to say modomotion was a godsend for me regardless of any of its perceived flaws.

For more details, you can read more here.

To run in Maya

Open animation .ma file Click Tag/Group Click Export and wait until it completely renders (safe to walk away and let it run)

To run in modo

 or manually...

Open your .lxo file, Right Click on the mesh item > Add Deformer > Influences > MDD Influence  

Select the .mdd file that was generated by modomotion... voila!

Jacob Barreiro's moma 

Recently, Brad announced the upcoming  Auto Character Setup Kit by Lucasz Paszera (who also wrote the script LP_BVH_Loader), and my guess is that everything in this article will soon become irrelevant, but I'm going to share it anyway for those who work with Maya.