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Exporter Guide

Round-Trip Workflow

Use this workflow for scenes that start as glTF or glb, are edited in Maya, and are then exported again with the built-in exporter.

Open Exporter Overview Install the Plug-in View Supported Features

  • 1. Import

    Use file/place2dTexture texture nodes. Keep materials, clips, and blendshapes.

  • 2. Edit

    Adjust materials, clips, and scene structure in Maya.

  • 3. Export

    Use Time Editor Clips or Sampled. Enable only the extensions you need.

  • 4. Validate

    Check the target runtime or run a glTF validator.

When importing the source asset, use these settings when possible:

  • Use file/place2dTexture texture nodes: enabled
  • Import Materials: enabled
  • Import Animations: enabled if you need animation round trip
  • Import Blendshapes: enabled if you need morph-target round trip
  • Import Gaussian Splats: enabled only when the external plug-in is available and you need splat content
  • Turn on Export Animation and choose Time Editor Clips when you want to preserve imported clip organization
  • Turn on Export Animation and choose Sampled when you want a simpler downstream result
  • Export Quad Topology only when you explicitly want Maya-to-Maya topology round trip
  • Gaussian Splats only when the bridge plug-in is available

Texture and UV Round Trip

The most reliable texture-transform round trip uses Maya file and place2dTexture nodes. That is why the importer defaults to Use file/place2dTexture texture nodes.

This allows the exporter to recover:

  • UV offsets and tiling
  • wrap modes
  • UV-set assignments

UV rotation is currently not working as expected

UV rotation from place2dTexture nodes is exported with pivot compensation (Maya rotates around UV center (0.5, 0.5) while KHR_texture_transform rotates around origin (0, 0), and the exporter adjusts the offset to compensate), but runtime support for KHR_texture_transform rotation is not working as expected at this time. Verify rotation results in your target viewer. Rotation is not exported at all for aiImage nodes.

Material Variants

Imported material variants can be re-exported as KHR_materials_variants when the scene still contains the variant metadata and the alternate materials have not been deleted.

Avoid deleting unused nodes in Hypershade if you plan to export variants later.

Animation Clips

Imported clips are organized in Maya Time Editor. The exporter can read those clips directly, which removes the older need to flatten everything through an external exporter.

Gaussian Splats

Round-tripping KHR_gaussian_splatting depends on the external gaussianSplat plug-in on both import and export.

  • On import, splat primitives are skipped when payload import support is unavailable.
  • On export, splat shapes are skipped when the export bridge is unavailable.

Validation

After export, validate the file in your target runtime or with a glTF validator, especially if you enabled optional extensions such as Draco, KTX2, mesh quantization, or gaussian splatting.