Maya Polygons

Is it possible to import Polygons?

If so is there an exporter for them, or it is just the NURBS exporter avaliable?

Yes, it is possible. The official Maya exporter was built with the assumption that everyone would use NURBS to make the sampling surface, but any poly surface that meets the criteria can be exported. There is no vertex based Maya exporter that I am aware of, so you are stuck with the surface approximation exporter developed by Qarl/LL. This means that the resulting map won't produce a scultpie mesh that has the same vertex placements as the mesh you used to generate the map. This makes for very hard to impossible faking of multi-piece or hard edged models just using the Maya tools.

Qarl seems to have the philosophy that sculpties should only be used for organic "blobject" type modeling (anyone doing fancy vert based modeling should stop and wait sometime mid next decade for LL to develop mesh upload I guess), so no vertex position based sculptie exporter was developed for Maya by LL. No one in the Maya community seems to have stepped up and made one either.

If you just want to use the poly modelling tools don't care about vertex accuracy go for it. If you want vertex level accuracy in your resulting sculpty mesh you can still poly model in Maya, and then export the mesh to Blender and create a mesh accurate sculpty map there.

Oh, and all the rules still apply - start with the proper mesh divisions, you need correct UV space, no extruding/beveling/mangling of the mesh etc. etc.

Qarls script (and the other one too .. sorry forget the creator) will work with both nurbs and poly's but with poly's you will have to run the resulting sculpt map through an image editor like photoshop to clean up the top and bottom before you import to SL.

If you're talking arbirtrary meshes, the answer is no, absolutely not.

If you're talking polygonal sculpties, then the answer is sort of. Qarl Linden's sculpt map exporter for Maya is optimized for NURBS, and as such, it does not track exact positions of vertices. Instead, it samples the surface, and generates an approximaton of it. For well-crafted NURBS surfaces, the results will be close enough that you'll never notice the difference. But for polygonal surfaces, you'll definitely notice that the vertices won't be exactly positioned the same way in SL that they are in your source model in Maya. Depending on the model, sometimes it will still be close enough; other times it will look horribly wrong.

If you need an exact duplicate of your source model, you'd be better off using one of the polygon-optimized exporters, such as Domino's Blender scripts, instead of using Maya. But if you're like me, and you're so hooked on Maya, you'd rather use it from start to finish than mess with another program, then the only answer at present is get good with NURBS.

If you don't like that answer, and you're good with MEL, you can always write another exporter that works similarly to the ones for Blender, Wings, Max, etc. Please share it if you do. There are loads of Maya users who'd be grateful.

Well if theres enough of us who want one, why don't we just put some cash together and pay someone to do it?

I could pitch in US$50, an accurate WYSIWYG polygon exporter for maya would save a lot of headache.

I'd chip in some cash, too, up to USD 50 or so.

Since it samples the surface and creates a map based on that, does that mean one could use extrudes, combine meshes and whatnot so long as the end product had a single surface? (for a sphere based sculpty).

I'd throw in some money too.

No, it would still need to follow the rules that all sculpts do, it would need to be a contiguous 32x32 (or oblong) shape. No extrudes/ect, but it would mean that sharp geometric shapes, and even more exact organic shapes, would be a lot easier to make in Maya. It wouldn't export data into the sculpt map from in between points(See Chosen's explanation above), In other words, it would look less like you wrapped a sock around the shape before exporting it.

Bump because I just spent way too much time trying figure a way to export from maya(dfx,obj,fbx), import into blender and wings3D, and then export into SL.

YAY! Ok, here's my temporary workaround for the time being. I got to this point by trial and error, so please play around with this method and post any findings here - I'm sure someone else will clean up or find ways to improve this workflow...

1 - Start with a 63x63 Polygon plane in Maya. (I haven't tested with oblong shapes yet, ect. Also 63 is used instead of 64 moreso for the purpose of doubling up our verts evenly in the next step)

2 - Select every other row of vertices, and using "snap to point" drag them over. In other words, every 2 row of vertices should be stacked in the exact same position. Do the same with columns.

3 - Save this shape for future work(so we don't have to recreate it each time)

4 - Using this basic shape, move verts and create whatever type of sculpt you're going for. You'll need to drag-select to grab our groups of 4 vertices, individually clicking an area will only grab one of the 4 vertices stacked there. *

5 - Export with Qarl's script as a 32x32 sculpt shape (again, not tested with oblong but you'll want to export with the true dimensions of the shape (I.E 32x32, not 64x64)

6 - Open in Photoshop and resize (resample method must be Nearest Neighbor method) to 64x64. Alternately you can resize up to 128x128.

7 - Save and import into SL.



* - Ok, also you can also select your mesh and click (polygons menu) mesh>triangulate. This will turn each polygon square into a tri. However, in the few tests I've run it has resulted in the tri's running the wrong way. (opposite of what the resulting SL shape exhibits)

** - this will (slightly to severely) mangle any baked surface texture.

edit - Cross posted to :
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/content-creation/26317-maya-polygons.html

Interesting. I'll give that a whirl when I get a chance. Thanks, Logan.

Just a quick heads up: Logan's method works like a charm for me so far. It's ideal for when you need non-organic, tricked out, "sharp" sculpts out of Maya.

Thanks for sharing this, Logan!

Here's my current level of knowledge on how to texture these poly objects:

Due to the "stacked" vertices, these "workaround" objects look messed up when you apply a file texture to them (In Maya, that is. The exported sculpty can be textured just fine in SL). Here are two ways to fix this:

1. After your modeling is done: select the object in component mode -> select all vertices -> SHIFT-RMB (Right Mouse Button) -> Merge Vertices -> Merge Vertices.
This collapses all "stacked" vertices into one each and you can texture the object as you want now.

2. Enter the UV editor, go into UV selection mode (RMB -> UV) and do the same with the UV coordinates as you did with the vertices, that is "stack" every second row vertically and horizontally, as can be seen here:


For baking purposes however, it seems to be mandatory to merge the vertices and use the "Average Normals" Tool (maybe you'll need to "Unlock Normals" first) to get the best results.

Logan, let me take a moment to say you rock! I finally got around to trying out your method, and so far it seems to work perfectly. Thanks so much for figuring it out, and for sharing your discovery. I'll continue testing, but at this point, I'm comfortable saying Maya's lack of polygon-sourced sculpties is a thing of the past.

Leban, I haven't tried your texturing setup procedure yet, but it looks like it should work. It's exactly what I would have thought of myself.

Chosen:
Do you know of a method in Maya that would allow to quadruple vertices? If this would be possible, it'd perfect Logan's method - first model and texture, and then modify the poly object so that the exporter work correctly with it.

I tried to find a way, but I'm not experienced enough in Maya to pull off that little trick...

There's no off-the-shelf way of doing that that I know of, Leban. I'm sure a MEL script could probably be written to make it happen, but if we're gonna go that route, it would obviously be better just to edit the exporter script so that the duplication would be unnecessary in the first place.

In the here and now, the work flow has to go the other way around. First overlap the vertices, then model your object and export your sculpt map, then merge vertices and texture.

I'm messing around with the poly setup you mentioned and it is nifty. But I'm wondering, what is the difference from using a NURBS plane and doubling the vertices? I imagine if you doubled up the vertices of a NURBS in the same manner, you would get similarly sharp corners because of the triple vertex at every corner, no? Only it would be easier to texture.

All NURBS surfaces are approximations of the actual form. It can be tricky to achieve EXACTLY the shape that you want to have - which in most cases doesn't really matter, but in some cases it does. For sharp, pointy and complex models NURBS control points can be a pain in the rear, since it requires you to exaggerate them drastically in 3D space so that the resulting surface shows the desired result like sharp edges or pointy things.

In these special cases, Logans method is superior because you can directly control the vertices of the resulting SL object instead of wrangling NURBS control points into submission until the NURBS surface looks like you want it to.

For Maya users that want to use polygon modeling and create oblong sculpts with high precision there's another alternative beginning to take form:

/8/3d/321183/1.html

Domino Marama, the creator of the Blender SL script suite, is kind enough to update his scripts so that they can handle a format that Maya can export and Blender can import (Collada .dae). Maya users will be able to export their objects to Blender and then use it's Sculpt baking scripts as an exporter to SL. I'm working with Domino to iron out kinks and bugs, but first progress has been made already.

The purpose of this is that Maya users (and users of other 3D packages that can export Collada) will be able to use Blender side-by-side to their "native" application to enjoy Dominos high-precision sculpt export scripts in order to create special case sculpties in their familiar environment without having to learn Blender modeling additionally.

Thanks to Domino for looking into this!

So, we just need to make a .dae file and export it through Blender? What sort of limitations do we have on the polygon mesh?

Yes. The latest Primstar scripts have a new option under File - Import - Collada 1.4 as Sculptie which does all the hard work for you. It calculates the optimal sculpt map size, creates the image, assigns it to the uv faces and renames the layer to "sculptie" if needed. Basically all the steps for the baker to work are done as part of the import.



It has to have a sculptie compatible uv layer. That's a gridded layout that fills the entire uv map. So in the Polygon Tool, under Create Settings (Texture Mapping), you have to deselect the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" checkbox when creating the mesh.

Thanks for doing this, guys.