Maya...HOLED sculpties

hi, is possible to make holed scultpies with Maya...and how?
thanks in advance

If you want a single hole, just use a NURBS torus as your starting point.

If you want to use collapsed polygons, then it gets a little more complicated. Since the Maya sculpty exporter uses surface sampling, rather than absolute vertex position reporting, you need to sort of trick it into discovering where all the points are. Logan Bauer outlines the method in this post: /8/c9/304304/1.html#post2345381



By the way, I'm currently looking to hire a MEL programmer who can add more functions to the exporter, but haven't yet found anyone up to the task. I've posted ads in the Help Wanted forum here, as well as in the Autodesk forums, and on a few recruiting sites. If anyone knows anyone who might be able to do the job, please let me know. IM me in-world, since my forum account here is broken, and doesn't let me access PM's. Thanks.

oh...thought i just could use the NURBS sphere, as starting point to make sculpties for sl...then something has changed

do u know also how to allign points to get perfect shapes? oh and..TY so much for your help!

Oh they added support for other stitching types many months ago. Sorry to hear you've been unaware of that all this time.

The non-sphere types actually were available for use almost since day one, but weren't yet officially supported. They were then only accessible via script, and it was a "use at your own risk" sort of deal. LL added full UI support a few months later, once they were sure everything worked as it was supposed to.

Select a sculpty, and take a look at the editor. You'll see a pulldown menu for stitching type, right underneath the sculpt map field. Options are sphere, torus, cylinder, and plane. Just make sure the in-world stitching matches the source model stitching, and you're all set.




I'm not quite sure what you mean by "align points to get perfect shapes". That could mean almost anything. Care to clarify?

yes.. i try
when i make a shape like a cilinder, i can scale the verticles, but that does'nt allow me to get the shape stright... humm i would like to know if there's some aligning tool, that get all point stright to a measurement...something like that...like all at the same valours..

If I'm reading you right, you're asking how to snap vertices into alignment, correct? If that's the case, then I'd strongly recommend you hold off on sculpties for a while, until you've learned more about Maya itself. Spend a few weeks mastering the basics of the program by going through all the Learning Maya tutorials in the help file, in order, before you do anything else. Sculpties will still be there when you're done, and you'll save yourself countless hours of aggravation along the way. As I so often find myself saying on this forum, don't try to put the cart before the horse.

That said, the direct answer to your direct question is learn to use the snap tools. At the top of the main Maya window, just to the right of center, you'll see a bunch of icons with pictures of magnets on them. Those are the snapping tools. With them, you can snap vertices (and other items) into perfect alignment with grids, curves, points, view planes, or live objects. You'll find yourself using the first three most often. Hotkeys for them are right across the bottom of the keyboard, as x, c, and v, respectively.

i do try! i wanna learn! not ust for sculpties but in general, ty so much

Have you considered Python? It might be easier to find someone to convert my Blender scripts to Maya than someone to do it all from scratch in Mel. The scripts are GPL v2.0 licensed and I always use the full Blender API names so they are all Blender.something, which should make it easy to see what needs changing to port them to Maya.

If you don't find anyone by the time my wrist is sorted out, I'll be available for commercial coding again then. I'd need a Maya license supplying for the duration of the project.