From: Tinintri Mistral
I've been trying to work with maya and make sculpties. Up until now, it was REALLY basic stuff. I didn't even know how to use polygons vs nurbs.
Let me stop you right there for a second. I'm not sure if you mean you didn't know in the beginning, but you now you do, or if you mean you still don't know.
If it's the latter, then the best advice I can give you is slow down, and forget all about sculpties for a week or two. Use that time to go through all the Getting Started tutorials in the help file. Unlike in most other programs, Maya's help is actually helpful. It's hands down the best help file I've ever seen, in any program. It will teach you what you need to know. There is no better way to learn the basics of Maya. Do not continue trying to make sculpties until you've got a good handle on Maya's fundamentals.
Maya can do literally hundreds of thousands of things, and there are dozens of ways to accomplish every one of them. Trying to learn the program with something so specialized and so unique as sculpties as your starting point is a recipe for disaster. Trust me; spend a little time now getting to know the basics in the right way now, and you'll save immeasurable amounts of time later. You'll never ever learn all those hundreds of thousands of things (no one does), but you'll be in a position to approach any one of them with success. Just saying "I want to make sculpties, so that's what I'll 'learn'" won't do. It just doesn't work that way. You WILL have problems (making sculpties as well as other things) if your focus is so narrowly pointed in the beginning.
Take a week or two off, and do all those tutorials (in order; don't skip around). You'll be very glad you did.
That said, let's talk about what's going on with your sculpt maps...
From: Tinintri Mistral
However, now that I am editing in slightly more detail, when I export my sculpties I am getting a repeated black triangle pattern border on the top and bottom of my sculpt maps. Is there something I'm (not) doing to cause this? Anyone have any suggestions of how to fix this? I've noticed I can pretty cleanly fix it in photoshop, but it's a real pain.
Any help is appreciated!
Sounds like you're trying to use polygonal spheres instead of NURBS spheres. The Maya UV-maps poly spheres by default is to use a saw-tooth pattern for the top and bottom rows of faces. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense, since those rows contain triangles, not quads. If you want to be able to use poly spheres, you'll need to remap them.
It's far simpler just to use NURBS spheres. Not only will this ensure a perfect UV space right from the start, you'll find that the results are usually cleaner as well. The sculpty exporter for Maya does not actually record the exact positions of vertices. It samples the surface, and creates an approximation of the shape, based on what it thinks it "sees" when in the sampling. You may have noticed that the poles of your poly spheres, for example, don't come out in exactly the same place on the sculpties that they're at in your Maya model. That's why.
Since NURBS are not exact to begin with, but are interpolated shapes, there's a lot more room for error in the sampling before it becomes noticeable. Also, since NURBS require you to overlap vertices if you want sharp edges, your NURBS-based sculpties will be naturally more resistant to distortion from LOD culling than would most poly-based ones.
Don't let me wording confuse you, though. When I say "not exact", I don't mean you don't have precise control. NURBS modeling offers very high precision, actually (the dashboard on your car was modeled with NURBS, for example). I just mean that since there are relatively few vertices, and since everything in between them is interpolated, complex shapes can be made with minimal requirements on the user for "precision" placement of every last point.
I'll take a minute to show off
by showing an example of how precise you can get with fairly simple NURBS modeling. This is a Cylon I've been working on, all NURBS spheres. The modeling took about a week.
Notice it's got the full range from sharp angles to smooth, organic curves (which is why it's such a great example of what sculpties can do). There are a few trouble spots, where things didn't sample quite right, wrinkles and what not, in a couple of places, but a good texture bake will hide that effectively.
Those few artifacts aside, it's worth noting that the SL version looks pretty much exactly like the Maya version, even though SL doesn't place every last vertex exactly where one might expect. Had the model been sourced from polygons instead of NURBS, it still would have looked good, but the discrepancies between the two models would be more noticeable.
I'm hoping one day somebody clever will expand the Maya sculpty exporter to include precision vertex reporting for polygons. If an when that happens, poly-based sculpties from Maya will be great. In the mean time, I use NURBS for all my sculpts.
That said, if you really do prefer to work with polygons, you're going to need to learn how to UV map them properly, or else you'll have to keep correcting for the saw teeth in post. You'll find that if you start with a poly cylinder instead of a sphere, it will be simpler to get the perfect UV space you need. From there, either collapse the ends to make poles for spheroids, or else just use the cylinder sculpty form in SL.