Making a skin or clothes in Maya?

I believe I've seen this somewhere. I don't know where, and I'm honestly not 100% sure I did see it.

I've searched the forums, but fail miserably at that anyhow, and no stickies mention it that I can find.

Anyhow, I'd like to try my hand at making clothes. Thing is, I'm not so amazing with photoshop with the templates. Sure, I could learn..but I'm a little bit lazy with the learning lately, and happen to have a new toy I can't stop playing with (Maya).

So, is it possible to make clothes 100% in Maya? Can I somehow import the SL avatar mesh, in the three sections I'd need to for a skin or clothes, and ma textures to it, and then bae it like a sculpty?

I think if I knew how to get the meshes into Maya properly I could actually just use the advanced sculpty exporter for the baked textures, maybe, though it might not be so easy.

So yeah. Anyone able/willing to give me some insight into this?

The main thing that's really got me going on this is a catsuit I made in Maya applied to a humanoid mesh, that I love how it looks, so I want to see if I can get similar results into SL.

Any help, thoughts, insight, etc would be greatly appreciated ^_^

Oh - sidenote, Maya Unlimited, dunno if any of the feature differences between complete and unlimited would matter for this.

it's actually quite easy to do a basic catsuit. I['m not to up on maya as I'm in the middle of learning 3ds Max myself at the moment .... laughs

but anyway, you don't need to bother with skin or anything on the actual mesh, you can just paint directly onto the av mesh, set up lighting and such, and then bake to texture, how you do those in maya is beyond me I'm afraid.

there is a tutorial for doing a t-shirt using lightwave somewhere on here, can't remember the authors name off hand, but I know she is in charge of pixel dolls (help please someone???)

the one thing to really be sure of is that you got the uv mapping right on the output, it should resemble the templates for that section. all the program can really do is give your clothes you've made in other programs a more realistic look with proper lighting and things like bumpmaps and speclarity

I know a catsuit isn't hard to make, but I mean that I've got the lighting, highlights, shadows, etc, perfect in my scene, and wanna try to recreate that in SL.



With Maya, I can paint the clothes, in pretty good detail, onto meshes, I've found. I don't want to do anything super amazing yet, just want to get it looking like..well.. clothes

And about the skin, I mean I want to make a skin using Maya as in paint the makeup, skin tone, wrinkles, some shadows (Like under breasts), etc in Maya, and then go from there.

For me, I am horrible with photoshop because I can't visualize a flat image of legs and face and such strewn about as if it were on an av, and taking it into SL to view every 30 second would get time consuming

So for me, Maya, or something similar would be a huge advantage, and I happen to have Maya, so might as well try and use it ^_^

I have no clue what sort of texturing tools are available in Maya, but if you're going to make anything worth wearing, you need to use photoshop. Photoshop is a complex tool, and learning it overnight is not possible, but it's extremely powerful. I can't possibly see how Maya would have the necessary texturing tools needed to properly shade and detail an article of clothing. Maybe Maya would be useful to render a texture made onto a mesh, but you can do that in the SL client right before upload. There's really no way to 'cheat' making clothing with Maya. Maya was made for creating 3D objects, not high quality detailed textures (afaik). Bite the bullet and learn Photoshop, there's really only about a billion or so tutorials out there, many of which are quite good.

Hi Keira. Welcome to Maya land.

Before you go any further, have you been through all the Getting Started tutorials in the help file yet? If not, stop what you're doing, and don't come back to this subject until you have. It's important to develop a solid understanding of Maya's basics before you do anything else. Don't try to go out of order, or you'll regret it later.

Don't be put off by the fact that some things in the lessons don't seem like things you'll need to know for what you think you're going to be using Maya for right now. Everything has to do with everything else. If you skip around there could well be something small and seemingly trivial that you'll miss that actually turns out to be a foundational lynch pin for all sorts of other things. Go through the lessons from start to finish before you do anything else.

Also, be prepared to rely heavily on Maya's help file forever. I've been using the program for years, and I still look things up in Help all the time. Maya's way too big for any one person to know how to do everything in it. And unlike with other programs, its Help is actually helpful. It's the best included documentation I've ever seen for any program. Whenever you're at an impasse, never hesitate to look up whatever you're trying to do in Help.

That siad, on to your questions...



Maya's procedural texturing tools are extremely powerful, but its 2D painting tools are not so great. If painting the texture is what you're looking to do, you'd be better off using Photoshop, or one of the more powerful 3D paint programs that are out there, like Zbrush. Texture painting in Maya can certainly be done, but you'll need an awful lot of time on your hands, not to mention patience, if you want to paint anything really good.

That said, the answer to your question is yes, it's certainly possible to make clothes 100% in Maya. But I wouldn't. I would use a combination of Maya and Photoshop.

I know you're not terribly anxious to learn how to use the templates, but you really must. That's where it all starts. The templates are actually UV maps, and if you're not visualizing how they wrap around the model, then you're also not visualizing how UV mapping itself works. That's probably the single biggest handicap you could have in texturing. I know the templates might seem like a step backwards, since Maya is new and exciting to you right now, and you're having so much fun playing with it, but really, it's all part of the same thing. Those templates are just as essential in Maya as they would be in Photoshop or any other program.

So you know, any polygonal model you ever make is going to require UV mapping. People who start out with SL, and then move on to other 3D applications are often shocked by this, since SL is so (for lack of a better term) "dumbed down".

For example, when an SL development company I used to work for was bidding for a large out-of-SL project for a very well known game maker (can't say which one, sorry), there were only a few of us who really understood what that was going to entail, as most of the artists in the company (including department heads) were SL people, not traditional 3D people. It was pretty amazing to watch some of the most respected artists in SL trash-talk about how "ridiculous", and "confusing", and "over-complicated", and [explative deleleted] this game company's procedure was, when in fact, it wasn't the game company's procedure at all. It was just the way things are done outside of SL. I remember a few "welcome to real 3D" type conversations, and a few "maybe we shouldn't be doing this" responses. SL can spoil even the most talented of people, since it's so easy. (We did get the contract in the end, by the way.)

Back on topic, if you want to do texturing, you're going to need to understand UV mapping. Learning to paint in 2D while thinking in 3D is crucial and foundational to becoming a good texture artist.

Now, if you want to use Maya as a learning tool for the templates, you certainly can. If you select one of the body sections on the model (upper, lower, or head) and then open up the UV Texture Editor, you'll see the UV map laid out. It will look exactly like the template, minus the color-coding. Then you can select individual UV lines and points, and you'll see them highlighted on both the 2D map, and on the 3D model. By doing that, you can learn very quickly what goes where.

To take it a step further, apply the template images to the models as textures. You'll then see those same selections superimposed on the templates. Want to know what part of the template corresponds with the left inner thigh? Just select some of the faces on that part of the model, and take a look at what lights up in the UV Texture Editor.

You can also take the bass-ackwards approach, which is to paint on the mesh with the 3D Paint Tool, and then watch where your strokes end up on the 2D canvas in the UV Texture Editor. The traditional method of learning is to go the other way around, paint on the 2D canvas and then see where the strokes end up on the 3D model, but in theory, if you're really dying to paint in 3D, the same information is there to learn either way. The drawback of doing it that way is you don't develop the "muscle memory", or "associative memory", or whatever you want to call it, of painting in 2D while thinking in 3D.

I should also add that I've almost never created a texture in 3D that didn't require at least some degree of cleanup in Photoshop afterwards, whether it was clothing or anything else. So even if you do end up doing your entire creation process in 3D, you're still going to need to have a good understanding of the 2D element in order to do post-process work effectively.

Any way you slice it, learning how to use those templates is necessary.


Absolutely. But remove the phrase "like a sculpty" from the equation. Texture baking is an important skill to learn, and it's not really very hard. Your only problem at this point, from what I can tell, is that you're trying to do too much too soon. You've had Maya for all of what, a week now?

Keira, I know that you are very intelligent, and I know that you're someone who seems to have a natural knack for understanding software very quickly. Both those traits will help make you an awesome Maya artist. But neither will in any way diminish the amount of steps it's going to take in order for you to be proficient with Maya. You will likely move through the steps more quickly than the average person, but you still will have to go through the same amount of them as everyone else.

The hard part is that the more capable you are, the more frustrating it can be to have to accept that truth. But accept it we all must.



Importing the meshes and cleaning them up are relatively simple procedures, which I'll be happy to explain. But before I do that, let me say forget about the sculpty exporter. You can create your own baking setup easily enough. There's no need to use one that's meant for a different task.

This tutorial covers the basics of how to set up for baking with both Maya Software and Mental Ray: http://tutorials.fromthehill.nl/bake/index.html . I recommend Mental Ray, so you know. The Maya Software renderer is not very good.

I'm not in love with how the author recommends setting up the lighting, by the way, but it's an OK start. The important part is that the procedures for the baking itself are all explained pretty well.



I'm about out of time right now, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut off this post in the middle. The next thing I was going to explain was how to import the mannequin models and clean them up properly so you can work with them in Maya, but I'll have to come back to that later. Sorry to keep you hanging.

I'll also explain how to create your catsuit procedurally, so you don't even have to paint it.

At this point, as I said earlier, I'm not looking to make super high detailed clothes and such. That is, as I know, a job for photoshop, or something like ZBrush, as Chosen said in the next post.

However, the shading and everything is partially easier in something like Maya (In my opinion) because you don't have to paint every shadow and highlight, if you do it right it's very possible to take a plain blue image and end up with it shaded rather like a t-shirt. Mind you this is waaaay simplified in how I said it, but still, you'd end up with shading and highlight in the right places.

That's what I'm trying to do at this point, is learn to use Maya for the shading, lighting, and basic texturing needed. Once I learn this, I'll take a more serious approach to photoshop, I just prefer to learn Maya first because, well..new toy, that I enjoy a lot more than Photoshop.

OK, next post will be rather long, disecting and replying to Chosen's message ^_^

Mmm...bits of your post will be removed, Chosen, cause I'd rather keep it less than novella length..which looking back, I've failed to do. Huuuge post. Wee ^_^

But everything I respond to directly will be kept for reference.


Yeppers, been through all of the Getting Started Tutorials and just about everything else I could find in the directory opened for those tutorials. Was amazed at the completeness of these tutorials, and all the bases covered. Definitely an amazing system, and very very rewarding when all done.

Of course, over time, I'll be referencing these and the help pages a lot, as there's no way I'm just going to up and remember everything in these tutorials and beyond. That'd be cool, but my head would probably explode.


Believe me, I've got time. But at his point, I'm just going for some basic stuff, really, see what I'm capable of in Maya, and what I'm not capable of.
Once I've learned my limits with Maya, I'll be learning Photoshop a bit better to do what I find I can't do in Maya. I know my strengths are in 3d applications, not in 2d, so I'm going with a rather odd approach of using the 2d program as my 'assist' tool, with the 3d as my main.

Believe it or not, I do understand the templates and UV mapping. I understand how it works, and generally why it works. I *can* and have used the templates, but they handicap me in that while I can visualize how they wrap, I can't visualize what I'm painting after the wrapping with any accuracy. Without any form of a 3d representation, I have to check constantly, otherwise I do something slightly off that skews the entire project.

I want to use Maya because it has that 3d representation, and with the amount of free time I have, I should be able to do pretty alright texturing for things, and then take it into PS for some fine-tuning, and end up with things I really think look good.

But starting ground-up in PS for me would be harder, and I feel that I wouldn't like the results nearly as much. With Maya, I should be able to get the general lines, folds, etc in (And shading), and then take it into PS and just thin the lines, clean it up, etc, and have it look pretty good.

If that makes sense.

For me, when using Maya for textures, I can say that it will be a combination of painting on the model and painting on the UV map..or template..or whatever technical term fits this case

I'd paint the most necessary lines onto the model directly, to have them placed exactly where I want them (Seams, pocket outlines, etc), and then paint the smaller details in on the 2d UV map.

This gives me a basic template for the exact project I'm working on, without having to check and recheck where the lines are on the model, and without having to restart the basics over and over until they're perfect.

I understand that I'm not going to make anything amazing purely in Maya m(Well..maybe someday =P), but getting something basic, that looks like a shirt, or pants, or a skirt, I should be able to manage. I know that I'll always need to do some fine-tuning and clean up in photoshop, because otherwise I'd be spending more time on texturing a single shirt than I would normally take for an entire cityscape, or something similar

Honestly, after I wrote it I realized that the 'like a sculpty' bit was a bad reference. I didn't mean exactly like a sculpty, but was using the texture baking for sculpties as a reference in that...well... I'm not entirely sure what capacity XD

I just meant it as in get the shadows, lines etc, baked in a manner they would work for the model in SL, as you have to do with sculpties.

And I always try to do tons immediately.. both an advantage and a downfall, I know. But as long as I've got the time and the drive, I figure why not? Can't hurt to try, and if I fail and give up once, I know I'll come back to it with my failings in hand and do better until I get it right.

You sound like my high school teachers >.> But of course, you're right. It's going to take a lot of effort, time, and knowledge, both my own and that from help files that I'll never remember, to do everything that I want to do.

My main advantage, as I see it, is that I absolutely love doing this. I love modeling, I love setting up lighting, rendering, baking textures (What little experience I have in that so far), painting on meshes (I played around in Blender for a while doing that, but that hardly counts as I had no goals in mind)

Because I love it, I devote more time to it, and my focus is rather complete when working in a 3d application. I'm always amazed at what I can create and how things work, and end up learning more than I realize until I do it again.


Yeah.. I realized after I said it that the sculpty exporter would
A. Likely not work for it since the mesh would be different in too many ways, and
B. Be too much for this. Sure, it's awesome for sculpties, but really it goes farther than needed for something like I'm talking about. It does more than needed, and therefore more could go wrong.

Yeah... seems most programs are like that.. the best I've seen seems to be Blender's but it's still not really as good as most 3rd party renderers.

So far I've only used the Maya Software renderer for checking my model. Doing lighting, materials, etc has all been checked with Mental Ray.
And thank you for the link ^_^


And once again, Chosen.. You're my hero XD

Someday, you're going to evolve into a manual or something. Seriously, you seem to know way more than should be possible for a human .__.

As promised, here's how to bring the avatar mesh into Maya, and clean it up so it's usable. The procedure is very simple, maybe 10 minutes worth of actual work, but explaining it with text is going to take a while. I'll be writing at a beginner level, which means I'll be including general Maya usage points, not directly related to avatar stuff, but still very important, throughout.


1. Get the mesh files.

Grab the mannequin files from the downloads section of the SL website, if you haven't already. Unzip them to any directory you like.


2. Keep your Maya projects organized. I CAN'T STRESS THIS ENOUGH HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS!!!

Since this is the first time we're doing this, we'll want to create a new project in Maya. To do that, click File -> Project -> New. In the New Project dialog that pops up, name the project whatever you want, choose a location for it, and then hit the Use Defaults button to set up the proper directory structure.

You must do this every time start anything new in Maya, or you'll end up over-writing files in other projects. That's obviously not a good thing to do. There's nothing less fun, for example, than destroying an image or video that took 20 hours to render because you were too lazy to keep properly organized.

It is absolutely crucial in Maya to make sure you're working on the project you intend to be working on at all times. The first thing you should do every time you start the program is take a look at what project is currently open. To do that, click File -> Project -> Set. At the top of the dialog, it will state the open project. If you want to work on a different project, navigate to your desired project directory, and click OK. If you want to start a brand new project, follow the above instructions.

Once again, I can't stress enough how important this is. There's no excuse for forgetting to check your projects. Drill that habit into your brain. Otherwise, you're destined for tragic disaster.


3. Import the avatar OBJ mesh

Before we can import an OBJ file, we need to make sure Maya is set up to do it. Click File to pull down the File menu. Notice that to the right of many of the commands there is a little black and white box icon. That's called the Options Box. Clicking it will bring up configurable options for each command. Right now, we we're concerned with importation options, so click the options box next to the word "Import".

In the Import Options dialog, click Edit -> Reset Settings. This will reset all the options for importation to their default status, which is what we want right now. If you've never imported anything before, then chances are the options are already at default, but it doesn't hurt to make sure.

Don't worry; you don't need to know what all the options are right now. Just make sure they're at their default settings, and click Apply.

Now let's import the mesh. Since you want to make a catsuit, I assume you want to deal with the female avatar. Click File -> Import, navigate to wherever you unzipped the mannequin files, and find the file called SL_Female.obj. Unless anything has changed since the last time I downloaded, it should be in a folder called SL Avatar.

When you click OK to import, Maya will warn you about a problem with shared faces and groups. That's alright; just ignore it. Click OK, and the model will appear.

Note, the model will come in very small, only about half a unit tall. You can scale it up in a few minutes if you want, but for now, just leave it the way it is. Zoom in if you need to in order to see it.


4. Unlock and soften the normals.

This particular OBJ is optimized for Poser, not for Maya. It's going to take a little work to make it well usable for our purposes in Maya.

One of the first things you'll notice if you look at the model in smooth shaded mode (in any viewer port, click Shading -> Smooth Shade All) is that it looks faceted, and that most of the facets have a strange blackish look to them. This is because the normals are locked right now. So the first thing we want to do is unlock them.

Select the mesh, and then in the Polygons section of Maya, click Normals -> Unlock. Right away, you'll see the faces change from that weird blackness to ordinary gray. Light is now reflecting properly off the surfaces. Deselect to get a better look.

There's still a problem, though. The model still looks faceted instead of smooth. This is because the edge normals are currently hard instead of soft. Select the model again, and click Normals -> Soften Edge. The model will now look smoother instead of totally faceted. It won't be perfect yet, but don't worry; we're getting there.

One remaining problem is that there are currently overlapping vertices, since the model was created in sections (outside of Maya), and then combined into a single mesh. We're going to want to get rid of that overlap. Click Edit Mesh -> Merge -> Options Box. Set the threshold really, really low, like 0.0010. Click Apply, then soften the normals again. The model should look considerably smoother now.

Don't get too wrapped up in wishing for it to be totally smooth, though. Keep in mind, it's a low resolution model, and not a particularly well made one at that. There's only so smooth it's gonna get.


5. Cut the model into the three body sections

Right now, the model is in one piece. You'll find it easier to work with if it's broken up into the three body sections (head, upper, lower) you're used to from SL. You don't have to do this; you can certainly work with the whole thing as one mesh, but I recommend you do since things will be a bit easier to understand this way. Later, if you want to experiment with working with the whole body as a single mesh, go right ahead. But for now, let's keep it simple.

There are several ways to do the separation. Let's focus for now on the simplest one. We're going to duplicate the model twice, and delete the parts we don't want from each copy.

Select the model, and click Edit -> Duplicate Special -> Options Box. In the Duplicate Special Options dialog, first reset the settings to default (Edit -> Reset Settings), and then change the number of copies to 2, and set the Translate to 1 on X (the fields aren't labeled, but unless you've changed your preferences, their order in every dialog is XYZ). Two new copies of the model will appear, each one grid unit away from the next. (Wouldn't it be cool if SL had special duplication options like this? It would save soooo much time.)

Select one of the models, and go into component mode. Set the selection mask to faces. Then Open the UV Texture Editor (Edit UV's -> UV Texture Editor).

The UV's right now will look like sort of like an explosion at a spaghetti factory, lines crossing every which way. That's because the three body sections of the model are right on top of each other, since all three share the same UV canvas space.

Draw a selection box around the head of the model, and you'll see things clear up dramatically on the UV Texture Editor. It will start to look more like the familiar head template you're used to seeing in Photoshop.

Depending on what you captured with your selection box, you might not have all the faces of the head section selected right now, and/or you might have grabbed a few from the upper body that you don't need. Cam around the model, and select all the faces that belong on the head. Deselect any that don't belong.

After you've got the entire head, and nothing but the head, selected (as evidenced by the UV texture editor looking exactly like the head template), press Delete. You'll now have a headless avatar model.

Repeat the process to remove the head and upper body from one mannequin, the head and lower body from another, and the upper and lower body from the third. When you're done, you should have a head, an upper body, and a lower body remaining. It doesn't matter which one comes from which model, by the way.

At this point, one of the objects will be centered over the origin of he grid, and two will not. Select the latter two, one at a time, and snap them over to the origin, so all three end up in alignment. Do this by holding down X (the hotkey for snap-to grid) as you move the objects toward the center.

You should now have the three body sections as three separate objects, aligned to appear as one complete body. I'd recommend deleting construction history at this point. Select all three objects, and click Edit -> Delete by type -> History.



You're all set. Save your scene file now, and you'll never have to perform these steps again. When you're starting a new project, simply copy the scene to the new directory, open it from there, and texture each body section as you see fit.

I'll come back and post about how to create your catsuit with procedural shaders when I have more time.



EDIT: I almost forgot. If you want to scale the model up, so you don't have to zoom in as far to work with it, I'd recommend putting the three pieces into a group, and then scaling the group. Select all three, and press ctrl-G. Then grab the scale tool , and stretch the whole thing as large as you want.

Haven't read the entire post yet, as I'm not at home to do it and remember it as well, but thank you Chosen!

Awesomely written, as usual, and a great little tutorial no matter the amount of experience in Maya! You should write books =P

So don't rely on SL as your previewing app. I even wrote a previewer for SL because the previewing tool can make such a difference to the work of texturing, but Maya is certainly good for that purpose too. Just make sure to have both Maya and Photoshop open while you are working on the texture, and then just click the button to Reload the texture in Maya whenever you save your work in Photoshop.


Just want to bolster Chosen's point here: I teach college courses in Maya and routinely open up Help when addressing questions. I do it in part because I want to teach them how to look the information up, but also because I just don't remember every obscure little function. It's only really necessary to remember the most common basic functions ("remember" isn't even the right word, because these things will become automatic) and don't waste mental energy trying to have a photographic memory about things you only do once in a blue-moon.

tangent: I think my tendency NOT to rely on my memory of how a given app works contributes a lot to my ability to move between a huge number of different applications fairly easily. Hell, last semester I was using Flash, 3D Studio Max, Maya, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator in my various classes; any one of those could overwhelm some people, and I was teaching all of them at the same time.

Sorry if that comes across as bragging, but the point I'm trying to make here is that relying on documentation does not lessen your expertise.

PM me for response to this bit. Happier now than I was earlier.


If I thought that relying on documentation made you less of an expert, I wouldn't praise Chosen so highly, nor anyone else that I think is absolutely wonderful(Your skill is rather high up there too. I hold Chosen more highly than others simply because of the amount of posts, and quality of posts. Grammar, instructions, accuracy, all is top notch. Others get close, but rarely show such professional posts in my opinion). Remembering command names and such isn't important, remembering the creativity and being able to find and use methods to express that creativity is important, I think.

Oh I'm not telling you not to use Maya's 3D Paint tool. In fact I agree that you should learn it, so that you can tell what the pros and cons are. I was just attempting to correct your one mistaken impression, that previewing the texture on the model is necessarily a hassle. For example...


While that is true for setting up the texture in the first place, there is a huge difference in how much effort goes into previewing changes to the texture while you work. With an efficient previewing workflow (such as using SLCP or Maya) you only have to actually apply the material to the model once, and then you simply click a button to Refresh every time you adjust the image. Previewing your work in SL however would mean redoing the entire process of uploading an image every time you want to look at it.

For a small amount of money you might even consider Ultimate Unwrap (www.unwrap3d.com) for your previewing tool. There I don't even have to switch the app I'm focused on, or click a button to refresh. The 3D preview window has an "Always on top" setting, and textures auto-refresh when modified.


EDIT: heh I did see it but I'm not upset or anything. My first line is a response to your purged post.

Ahah.. posted more to my last post.

Anywho

Using SL as a previewer is actually no different a work flow. Just keep SL open, and to re-check just go back into the directory and hit enter, and there's the newer version, updated and everything.

It's just more resource extensive than a simple previewer is (Most likely, though I don't know for certain).

At any rate, I'm still not going to use Photoshop for anything until I'm generally happy with what I end up with in Maya, and then I'll still use Maya as a previewer because I can then re-bake the textures for the exact lighting I want on TOP of all the details.

I may do things a bit roundabout, but as long as it's my way of doing it, and isn't costing anyone else money, it's fine by me.

ETA:: I find the SL previewer to have fine accuracy with textures, the only time I see any problems is scupts. Lighting in the previewer is set by the lighting in the world around you, so you can also test it in various in-world lighting situations, which is nice.

This thread has been EXTREMELY informative to me. Thanks alot, all of you. I learned a bit about maya, looking forward to seeing the rest! I'm also looking into baked avatar lighting. At the moment I'm trying to make new clothing that crosses the upper/lower body seam, so this will be very helpful. I also tried it with Lightwave, but I couldn't seem to figure out how to turn the avatar into a male (I was following the tutorial by Nephilaine of PixelDolls here: http://www.nafii.com/PixelDolls/?p=87). Someone else had this same problem, but she never answered their questions. It's a rather old article.)

Looking forward to learning the rest, I can't wait! Still trying to figure the rest of it out on my own in the meantime.

Thanks again!

Just because it's not completely obvious (I don't like the download page), here's the actual page for the avatar mesh.

http://secondlife.com/community/avatar.php

Though I haven't checked the mesh yet, the 'avatar_mesh' zip from the downloads section of the SL site (As linked in my above post) contains both a SL_Female.obj and an SL_Male.obj

Just check inside the SL Avatar folder in the .zip, and you should find them.

Chosen, I've found one problem with what you've written so far (Just now finally getting to this. Bleh..school is icky, but necessary)

You say that you can use the outliner as opposed to manual drag selection, but I've found that without any other preparation, the outliner will select all three of that body part in the scene, not just for one model. This makes it a bit odd to work with since you then have to de-select the head areas on both of the other models (Or whatever body section you're doing).

For now, I'm being a little lazy and not figuring out how to rectify this but just making five total scenes.

One with the mesh as one whole object.

One with the entire model there, but separated into the three.

One with just the head section.

One with just upper body section.

One with just lower body section.

This way I can easily choose which I want, and I can not have to worry about the outliner selecting for now (I'm using manual selection for the 3 piece scene).

ETA:: I do remember one of the Getting Started files telling me how to template an object, and that would probably fix it, thinking about it.

That would be Display > Template, for those watching at home ^_^

I followed Chosen's instructions and created a male .obj in three seperate parts, they even show up in the list in Lightwave. The only problem is...it doesn't stay smooth. I see the male .obj body all blocky and ugly, as if I'd never smoothed it in the first place.

EDIT:
I just found the "Smoothing" Checkbox. It still seems maybe a little blocky around the chest area, but I think we've only got the wonderful SL mesh to thank for that.

Ahh, this thread has made my day.

Yeppers, it's still a little blocky in some places, just due to the low poly-ness and...ermm..creative manufacturing

I just decided to make a website with helpful files and tutorials and such for content creators in SL.

At the moment I've only got the female mesh uploaded for download, but it's better than nothing ^_^ (Maya Binary format only for now)

I'll be adding the male later tonight, as well as a tutorial or two, and working on more content over time.

Anywho, decided to make it a little easier than having to go through this (Though it's a good thing to do anyway)

http://demoneyedesigns.zxq.net/downloads.html

UPDATE:: Now has Maya scene files for male and female meshes, as well as the maya advanced sculptie exporter script.

I added the script (With recognition to Qarl) because when I had to download it, I couldn't from the wiki link properly, so might as well try it myself ^_^

Whoops. You're right. My mistake. I've edited my post to remove the paragraph about the outliner. It's easy enough to make the selections right on the model. Better to keep it simple.

If you really, really, really want to use the outliner, though, then one quick and easy way to set it up is to import the OBJ three times, rather than importing it once and duplicating.



I'd suggest using Maya ASCII format (.ma) instead of binary (.mb). If it's binary, it will only work with one version of Maya. If it's .ma, it's just a text file, and you can open it in any text editor, change the first line, and it will work in whatever version you want (assuming there's nothing in the scene dependent on any features that don't exist in the target version, which in this case, there isn't).

I did not know that. Good tip!

Seconded ^_^

Re-saving and uploading., thanks Chosen ^_^