G'day again folks!
I'm excited to share that I have made the Simple OBJ Exporter fully open-source under the MIT License, updated for Maya 2025, and it is now hosted on GitHub.
Firstly, after releasing my silly little tool in 2020, I have been very fortunate to have received many lovely comments, messages, and emails from Maya users and artists for whom the tool solved a very real and niche problem - and that personally has been an amazing experience - if one of those was from you, thank you!
Pretty shortly after releasing the tool in 2020, I got a new job in 2021 where I started to really shift into Houdini land (yeah I became one of those Houdini guys from every studio - no but for real, we could do this so much easier bro, please you should just check it ou-).
Sadly, given how little I use Maya now, I can't really commit to maintaining the tool for years to come, or adding extra features or bugfixes etc, so I wanted to do a proper open-source repo to give the (legal) blessing to anyone who wanted to tweak or extend or copy the tool.
However, while I was setting up the repo I started to think to myself: "yeah I could probably sneak that feature someone asked for on ArtStation about 3 years ago 🤔". Over the last two weeks, my little tweaks ended up being full rewrites, and the tool now has a Combine option, and ability to Save and Load defaults - two very sane ideas from ArtStation comments that I'm ashamed took this long to get in. But I am very happy where I leave the tool for now, it is the best iteration so far.
If you reallly want to throw me a coin, the updated tool is still available from Gumroad with pay-what-you-want, but simply mirrors what you would get from the GitHub.
Thanks again for the kind words over the last 5 years, and please - maybe now more than ever - keep making art! ❤️