Newbie Questions

I've been attempting to learn modeling and have been focusing on learning Maya, which I love the interface for. However I have been having problems with importing my sculpts into Maya.

I have primarily been trying, first, to create a one-prim bench using a NURBS sphere. Initially I tried using a sphere with a "resolution" of 32x32 but it always came out with really jagged edges in SL. After that I was told by someone to use a 16x15 sphere, which I did. Now when using that sphere most of the edges are perfect...but I end up with a wedge cut out of one side of the sculpt and the flat part of the bench seat is missing.

What I want to know is what is the best "resolution" to use and what sorts of things do I need to make sure to do so that the sculpt will actually translate into SL. Also if someone could point me in the direction of a good texturing program/baker I would very much appreciate it.

Well I figured out what I was doing wrong. I had read somewhere that setting the export size, in maya, to 128 wouldn't cause any problems and that it might even help in some small way...don't ask me where as I can't find it now. Anyway I FINALLY tried exporting in 64x64 (after trying everything else a dozen times over) and finally had the bench ACTUALLY come out how I wanted it to come out!

Now I just need to learn texturing...What program would you people suggest I use to do my texturing with, I use Maya for my sculpting obviously, so hopefully something that would work well with that.

Glad you got things sorted out. Incidentally, I'm guessing you probably changed something other than just the size, since just using a 128x128 map won't cause the problem you mentioned. All it will do is give you a sculpty that takes longer to load than it ordinarily would. In any case, whatever your settings are at now, just leave them there, since it's working.

To answer your question about texturing, the best thing to do with sculpties is to bake textures directly in Maya. Be prepared, though. Baking is a big subject. At a minimum, you'll need to learn to get good with lighting, creating materials, and setting up shader networks. So don't expect overnight success (but don't expect it to take months either).

The best renderer to use for baking, if you can afford it, is Turtle. (illuminatelabs.com) You can also get good results with Mental Ray, which you already have (comes with Maya), but it will take longer, and will require a lot more tweaking if you want to use advanced effects like global illumination and such.

I'd also highly recommend you get Photoshop. At least 3/4 of all textures in the world are either created entirely in Photoshop, or at least edited in it. There are less costly alternatives if you don't want to spend $600-1000 on an image editor, but none are as powerful or as well documented as PS. The upcoming version (CS4), which will be out in a few weeks, will allow you to paint directly onto 3D models, using all of Photoshop's tools. It should be spectacular. (Note, you'll need to convert your NURBS models to polygons in order to port them to PS.)

As you may already know, Maya also has 3D paint capabilities, but the tool set isn't all that good. It's just got a few basic brushes, not very versatile or powerful.

Not sure what else I may have changed as I had tried everything else before that multiple times...but maybe something just took this time that hadn't previously. Either way I am just excited it worked.

I guess it is time to get started reading PS tutorials if that is what I'll need to use. Do you happen to know any tips that may not be in the tutorials but that are helpful to know?