VVysoraStudio help

Maya, SketchUp, Rhino and Revit

Shading groups and transform names in Maya, and the rules that apply to any CAD tool that can reach GLB or FBX — zones, units, pivot and triangle budget.

Vysora does not care which application your model came from. It needs a GLB or FBX with one material per recolourable part, named nodes, a floor-level pivot and a known unit. Read How material zones work for the reasoning behind all of that. This page covers Maya in detail, then the honest position on CAD tools.

Maya

Shading groups are your zones

Maya assigns materials through shading groups — the shadingEngine nodes a shader connects to. A face set assigned to one shading group exports as one primitive, and Vysora reads one zone per primitive.

So the unit of recolouring is one shader per zone. A chair whose seat, legs and frame should be configurable separately needs three shaders, each on its own face selection, even when all three look identical at handoff.

Two face sets sharing a shading group are one zone permanently. Nothing in Vysora Studio can split them; the only fix is a re-export.

Transform-node names become the zone's mesh name

Maya gives you two names for every object, the transform and the shape beneath it, and glTF exporters write the transform name onto the node. That is the name Vysora uses.

This trips people up because the Outliner shows transforms by default while the Attribute Editor often shows the shape. Leave the transform at a default like pCube1 and pCube1 is what the client sees in Studio next to the swatches they are choosing.

Rules worth following:

  • Rename every transform to something meaningful: seat, legs, frame.
  • Keep the shape name in step with the transform. Vysora falls back to the mesh name if the node has no name, and to the literal string unnamed after that — two unnamed objects both become unnamed and cannot be told apart.
  • Make names unique across the whole scene, not only within a group. glTF names are not path-qualified, so |chair_a|leg and |chair_b|leg both arrive as leg, and Vysora matches on the bare string.

Slot order

When one mesh carries several shading groups, the primitives are numbered in order, and Vysora stores every folder assignment against that number. Changing the assignment order on a re-export re-addresses the zones, silently. Settle the material order before handoff, and add new shaders at the end rather than in the middle.

If each object carries exactly one shading group, every zone is slot 0 and the mesh name distinguishes them. That is the safer hand-off when the product genuinely has separate parts.

Units, pivot, export

Maya's default working unit is centimetres, so a model that is correct in Maya is often 100× out if the unit is not declared. Set Source unit explicitly at upload. Auto-detect never recognises inches, misreads anything genuinely over 8 m, and misreads millimetre models under 800 mm.

Before exporting:

  • Freeze transformations and delete history, so no scale is hiding in the transform. A scale left in the transform cannot be fixed per-object in Vysora — a unit correction rescales the entire model.
  • Put the pivot at the centre of the footprint with the base of the model at Y = 0. Maya is already Y-up, so no axis conversion is needed.
  • Export a binary glTF (.glb) if you have a glTF exporter available, otherwise FBX, which Vysora converts server-side. Textures must be embedded in the file; external image references have nothing to resolve against in a single-file upload.

After an FBX upload, check the zone list on the product's Material groups tab before the client starts mapping swatches. Conversion reports nothing about what it changed.

SketchUp, Rhino, Revit and other CAD tools

These tools can reach Vysora, but the advice here is general rather than step-by-step. The rules below are what the pipeline actually enforces. Anything more specific about menus and exporter options depends on your version and plugins, and we would rather not guess on your behalf.

Materials decide zones, and CAD tools are generous with materials. A CAD model often carries dozens — one per layer, per component, per imported block, sometimes per face. Every distinct material becomes a zone, and above 50 slots you get 62 material slots (recommended ≤ 50) — consider merging materials. The bigger problem is that the Material groups tab is a flat list with no search or bulk assign, so sixty zones is sixty cards to configure by hand. Consolidate to one material per part the customer will genuinely choose, before you export.

Triangle budget is the usual blocker. CAD geometry tessellates hard: curved surfaces, threaded fixings, fillets and imported hardware libraries all multiply. The limit is 500,000 triangles and the model is rejected above it, not reduced. Export at the coarsest tessellation that still looks right at product scale, and strip anything the customer will never see — interior structure, fasteners, mechanisms.

Names are usually the weak point. Whatever your exporter writes as the node name is what appears in Studio. Layer names, block names and default identifiers all arrive as-is. Name the objects before export if the exporter lets you, then check the result rather than assuming.

Units are almost never metres. Architectural and engineering files are commonly in millimetres, feet or inches. Declare the unit at upload every time. Inches in particular are never auto-detected.

Pivot and orientation need checking. CAD origins are often the project origin or a survey point, which can be a long way from the object. Move the model so its base sits at the origin before exporting, or expect it to arrive floating, sunk or offset.

Send GLB or FBX. Those are the two formats that carry materials. OBJ carries none — the .mtl and texture files are separate files, and the upload is single-file, so an OBJ arrives as bare geometry with no usable zones at all.

If your tool cannot produce a usable GLB or FBX directly, the common route is to bring the geometry into Blender, 3ds Max or Maya, rebuild the materials one per recolourable part, name the objects, and export from there. The application pages cover that end: Export from Blender and Export from 3ds Max.

When something arrives wrong, My model came in wrong works back from the symptom.