Custom visualization of metadata

RFlannery1 — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 18:56:00 GMT

I am experimenting with adding per-face metadata to meshes as described on this page: https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2022/ENU/?guid=GUID-688D724C-F0D9-4649-BDD4-86E2447CFA05. I have successfully used the commands dataStructure, addMetadata, and editMetadata to add some metadata. Now I am trying to view the metadata, but I have run into some limitations.

One of my metadata members is an int32. Using the "Metadata Visualizations Options" window, I can get it to display in grayscale. 0 maps to black and the highest value maps to white. But I would like to display it in more of an indexed color mode. For example:

0 - red
1 - teal
2 - brown
etc.

I can see that the "Metadata Visualizations Options" window calls the command showMetadata under the hood. But it does not support indexed colors.

I am also interested on other custom visualization options. For example, if I have two boolean fields, I would like to color those faces where both booleans have a True value.

How can I achieve this?

Could I load a custom HLSL shader into a dx11Shader node and use that? Is there any way for an HLSL shader to access Maya metadata?
Could I use the API to write a custom software shading node or hardware shading node and access the metadata that way?
Is there some other option I'm not thinking of?

Re: Custom visualization of metadata

RFlannery1 — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:24:02 GMT

Still digging into this. Maybe it would be better to use blind data instead of metadata? I prefer the way that blind data is stored in the Maya ASCII file over the way metadata is stored. But I still have no clue which would be better for making a custom data visualization.

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Custom visualization of metadata

Re: Custom visualization of metadata