What is blind data?

Blind data is information stored with polygons which is not used by Maya in any way, but is useful to the platform to which you export the polygons, such as an interactive games console.

For example, when you use Maya to create content for interactive game levels you can use blind data to specify which faces of the level are “solid” or “permeable” to the character, or which faces on a polygon mesh are lava and hurt the character, and so on.

You use Maya’s Blind Data Editor to:

define the blind data types you need, and then apply the blind data to objects or components in your scene.
query your scene for blind data of a specific type or set of values and use false coloring to visualize what blind data is assigned to each objects.
Note
You can also apply blind data to NURBS patches using “face”, but you cannot false color it.

Templates

A template is a list you can create for each component that lists one or more blind data attributes as well as their data types.

Possible data types for attributes are:

int (integer numbers).
float/double (real numbers).
boolean (on/off).
string (text).
binary (raw data).

You can specify what components (faces, vertices, edges, or all types) the template applies to.

Each template needs a unique ID. Every attribute needs both long and short names for setting and retrieving the data.

When you create a template, you can also create one or more presets that will load pre-defined values into the attributes.