Export out of Alias with reasonable Geometry

[jonsX942W]

I need to know the proper steps to get a complicated (massive and complicated) model from alias to Maya as a mesh that is not in 1 billion pieces and has some shader associated with it. There is no where online that documents this well and the people that use your products tend not to know how to do it. I need to get this model In maya Asap for a tight deadline and when I export fbx from Alias the 500mb fbx takes 2 hours to open and it is in thousands of pieces and basically unsalable.

[c3systems]

The recently released Autodesk 2025 products, including Alias supports USD format. 

https://help.autodesk.com/view/ALIAS/2025/ENU/?guid=wn-alias-usd-support-2025

Alternatively, if Maya is installed on the same machine as Alias is installed, File-> send Selected to Maya function will be enabled and can be used to send Alias data (including layers, shaders etc) directly to Maya.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/ALIAS/2021/ENU/?guid=GUID-64976B97-4A30-4FDD-968D-A7CB93789BD5

Hope it helps.

[jonsX942W]

Hi thanks for the reply. Those two solutions don't seem to get me very far. the problem is the thousands of shells of pieces the object has when exports. Nothing I have found actually merges the object into one piece. This took me all weekend. 
I selected a small piece of the vehicle (by shader color)

>put it on a new layer

> converted it to a mesh

> Deleted all of the original nurbs (that way they don't export when I select everything in the layer to export)

> exported fbx with tessellation turned off and weld verts turned on (however this never actually welded verts)
> import in to maya for over an hour sometimes. 
> wrote a script to combine pieces in clumps of 500.  
> Realized that my tessellation was not small enough when converting to mesh and had to do it all over again. .5 was better then the default 1

I'm pretty sure there is a better way. 

[c3systems]

Without seeing the actual geometry, the following workflow is based on the premise that the you need the geometry to be merged, classified by shaders.

Try the following.

• Ensure that the geometric normals point outwards in Alias.
• Select the objects by each shader from the shader lister.
• Stitch the objects in Alias and assign the shader to the resultant stiched objects.
• Export the stitched objects.

Hope it helps.