QUICK AND DIRTY RDN MAYA SETUP

MAYA 5 IS INSTALLED < YOUR AW DIRECTORY >

HOMEWORLD 2 IS INSTALLED IN < YOUR HOMEWORLD2 DIRECTORY >

GET THE MAYA 5 PLUGINS
HERE

THE MAYA 5 DLLs
HERE
Shader scripts
HERE

I spent some time streamlining the files and the process, so if you get the files from another place, the installation will be different, nothing was removed, but this reorganization makes it a lot easier to set up the plugins

FIRST WE NEED TO SET UP THE ENVIRONMENT
THIS IS REQUIRED FOR MAYA TO EVEN FIND THE RESOURCES IT NEEDS

right click on "my computer" and select "properties"

click on the "advanced" tab and select "environment variables"


now you can either set the following under user variables or system variables, I suggest system, but make sure the entries you enter ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PATH TO YOUR FILES
click NEW for each entry and then type in the following

if the path has any spaces in it then fully enclose it in quotation marks as shown

a. HW2_ROOT -> “C:\Program Files\Sierra\Homeworld2” this must be the root of the homeworld directory

b. MAYA_APP_DIR -> “%HW2_ROOT%\Maya” this specifies where the plugins and scripts for maya are located, you will have to make a directory in the homeworld2 folder called 'maya'

c. MAYA_INSTALL_DIR -> “C:\program files\AliasWavefront\MAYA5.0” or wherever Maya is installed on your computer.


just to make sure this stuff worked, goto start->run and type in the following and make sure the correct directories popup

%HW2_ROOT%
%MAYA_APP_DIR%
%MAYA_INSTALL_DIR%

once the paths are correctly configured we can now install the resources from the RDN package

Install the RDN package to your %HW2_ROOT%\RDN we are doing this just for oganization purposes and so that you have all of the files

extract the mayaplugin.zip into the %MAYA_APP_DIR% directory

extract the mayadll.zip into the %MAYA_INSTALL_DIR%

your directories should look like this


fire up maya

you shouldn't get any explicit warnings and the relic tools tool bar should show up.

In maya Go into Windows->Settings/Preferences->Plug-in Manager and make sure that the following items are set to ‘auto load’ (these are the Homeworld 2 plug-ins and should appear if the installation was done properly):

AnimExport.mll
Annotation.mll
btgimport.mll
FlightManeuversExport.mll
FreezeShipScale.mll
Homeworld2Export.mll
HW2GetBB.mll
LevelExport.mll
shipmayaobj.mll
Shizoom.mll

Close and restart Maya. to load up the plugins

you should now be able to load up the ships in the
C:\Homeworld2\RDN\DataSrc\Ship\Hgn_Carrier or hgn_interceptor directories and the textures should show up.

you should now be able to export the RDN ships correctly and can now proceed with creating your own ships.

one thing that I know that gets forgotten is having the shaders directory not extracted into your data directory, this causes export errors, I included it in these plugin files for your convinence