Maya: Bake a mirrored animated sculptie?

I plan to model a mirrored nurbs object (not attached to itself down the center, will explain later) that needs to be animated. I've done this kind of thing in Blender already, but I wanted to explore what Maya can do before I settle on a final decision on how to approach it. I spent some time, and I'm spending more time studying Maya's interface and its NURBS system to make sure I don't become limited by my knowledge alone- please forgive me in advance for any knowledge gaps if I ask something dumb ^^;;

Here are the key problems I'm coming across, and I need suggestions, advice, and direction on, I'd be immensely grateful if someone could shed some light on these questions (I bet Chosen would know ;P). I'm willing to read any documentation needed, RTFM, etc., I just need someone to give me a general idea of how to "connect the dots" so to speak.

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1. Mirrored and not attached, and will still bake: (SL will connect the two in sculpty mode)
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I assume after I model the first half of my surface, I duplicate an instance of it, and scale to -1 on the desired axis to get my mirror. I do not want to attach it down the center because I don't want to waste needed detail vertices spanned across the middle where I can let the SL faces simply connect. Think of a car axle with two wheels, I'd model the wheels, lay them down into a sculpt, and then because of the way the sculpties work, there would be a single row of faces connecting the two wheels when baked into a sculptie to act as the axle.

On first glance, I don't yet know how I can get maya to see two visually separate surfaces as one (I'm still learning, so forgive me for knowledge gaps), so that I can rebuild/parameterize the two from 0 to 1 and get the Maya exporter to bake it out as one sculpt. I could possibly rebuild the first surface from 0-.5, and then the second surface from .5-1, and then attach.. but again, I'm still new to this, I don't know yet if it's possible.

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2. Animated mirrored and not mirrored
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I have a link somewhere to a script that bakes a set of animated sculpts, so I assume once I solve the aforementioned problem, I can do this part quite easily. I may want to discard the mirror, making the object whole and doing two different things at each end of my object, so I just wanted to make sure I knew all the animation possibilities with Maya.

Ah, here's the link to what I'll be using, but if you have a different method, please tell me!
http://www.purplestatic.com/anim_sculpt/



Notes:
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For #1, I know I could edit things around in photoshop, but I would like to keep as much of the process as "Maya-tastic" as possible, making it so that everything just bakes, exports and assembles without having to do any middle-work for SL, or risk ruining how well multiple sculpts flow together. The more time I spend in Maya and the less time wrangling sculpt maps in Photoshop, the more I can concentrate on concept, technique, and style.

Thanks so much for bearing with this long post! Please post any information you might have to help!

-- Raz

You've got some very good, and well thought out, questions here. Unfortunately, you're probably not going to like the answers to some of them. Sorry.



Yes, you'll get a mirrored surface that way. Check the normals, though. The copy may end up inside out. If it is, reverse the surface direction along one axis, and then delete history and freeze & reset transformations.



I'm not quite following you. A sculpty needs to be a contiguous surface. You can't make a single sculpty from two separate source surfaces, at least not via any technique I'm aware of.


Not possible with NURBS, as far as I know. It could be done with polygons, of course, but the Maya sculpty exporter doesn't like polys very much. It's really optimized for NURBS.




I've got no experience with animated sculpties, so I can't comment. That script looks pretty cool, though. Thanks for the link. New toys are always fun. I'll have to play.

Thanks so much for a quick reply! ^^ I tried a few more things in Maya tonight- Since you told me it couldn't really be done by trying to combine two separate surfaces into one non-contiguous object, I crossed that out and was able to concentrate on better routes ^^ I realized I could get closer to what I wanted controlling my parameterization.

However, so far I only have it working where I'm doing it with a whole object and no mirror. Is there a way to rebuild a 0-1 surface to a 0-.5, and a .5-1? If I can do that, I can model and animate one side, and then attach (animations should remain after that operation, yeah?) so that the surfaces add up to 1. Also, when I rebuild 0-.5 surface with Keep set to active, it still gets changed to 0-.4, any ideas what might be causing that?

Cheers!
-- Raz