Here we go, it's a Terragen question laddies!!

Alrighty, that see if someone can answer this in less than 2 days. I need a way to import terragen terrains into Maya. I tried exporting the terrain as an .OBJ and then Maya said, "there was an error reading the file". Can someone please help me.

It feels like I got my legs cut off and I have to convert the bandage into a band-aid. (Only there is less blood)

It might not be possible, or at least might not be straightforward. This took a while to track down. Seems Terragen (with the F.E.O. tools) exports OBJ files incorrectly. Maya's import denotes an index out of range. Upon examination, I found that a test terrain had 514 polygonal faces that referenced nonexistant, out of range, vertices. Hence Maya choking. Either the export is not including some vertices somewhere or is incorrectly building them.

So you could either delete the offending faces (which will leave holes but you might correct that in Maya, might not be an issue if those polygons never face the camera), correct them (which might produce totally wrong faces and besides it's too much work) or email the FEO author and report the bug.

On a test terrain I created, it defined 65792 vertices. But about the last 514 polygons referenced vertices greater than 65792. I located the lines with vertices larger than 65792 on textpad, most at the end of the file, and just deleted them. After that Maya imported the terrain like a charm. On one edge of the terrain there were a couple of rows of flat polygons (due to my quick editing I guess) but could be dealt easily and besides since the terrain is so big it would be an issue unless you point the camera right there. I would say 98% of the terrain was there and usable.

It's simple enough to export the map and apply it a geometry displacement in the apps I've worked in (XSI & 3dsmax). I am sure you could do the same in Maya.

Dunno if this is helpful, but the script that I use to import terrains into Blender can only handle terrains no larger than 257 x 257 terrain units.

Well, I suppose my next question would be, Terragen already seems to export Ligtwave Objects. Do any of you know where I can find an "import .lwo plugin" for Maya 5? This might be easier. Sorry malducin, I open my .OBJ up in Notepad, but I haven't a clue on where to start editing.

Actually after looking at the surface a bit more, even the editing might have screwed to much the surface.

Anyway as someone said you can always export the grayscale image and use that as a displacement map in Maya.

I've only heard of 1 specific translation program (besides dedicated translators like Deep Explotration and the Okino products). It is called Project Beaver, though I haven't heard of any update from that in a while,might be dead, but an old version (for Maya 2/3) is still available at Highend3D. I have a version of it but at the most it was for Maya 4.

Of course the other way is to ask a favor, as there are many more LW users here than Maya. Just have someone take your LW surface and convert it to OBJ or 3ds. Rhino3D might also work for translation.

Edit:

Just did a quick check and seems Alias imports DXF files. I think there is a way to export terrains from Terragen to DXF, maybe via FEO or some other plugin. Might be worth a try.