Cutting parts out of a texture automatically?

[Anonymous]

Hey there

I'm trying to figure out if / how I can convert a single texture with lots of parts of a 2D character in it, into individually modeled parts with minimal visiable alpha, ultimately to automate the process of turning it into a animatable character as below (blacked out for confidentiality)



IDEALLY with MEL because I'm on Maya LT, also BTW this would be for fbx export to Unity. I know it would involve some used of "colorAtPoint" to find which bits of the image are a bit and which are alpha but I got lots when trying to figure out to to group all those position values into chunks without duplicates but being aware of idems with potential holes in, etc etc, bit complex for just my brain. Then I assume you would just create a plane for every piece then transform the components up to the edges.

Ultimately I'm looking for some of the functionailty seen here http://esotericsoftware.com/

Thanks for your help.