Maya questions.

Ok, so we can't use Maya to make bjects for the world. But can we not use Maya to make objects, export them as OBJ then get them into SL?

Allow me to explain why I ask this. I have a great working of knowldge of Maya, both in modeling and Animating. I just spent a good ammount of time trying to make simple things with prims that I could make in a few seconds with Maya.

I am sure this frustrates many persons who have experince with other packages are just as frustrated and I can understand some reasons why Lindin Labs might not want to impliment an outside building program.

I know that polygon limits would need to be implimented, I've been touring the world for the last few days and I can see where complete outside freedom would be a bad thing, but I'd settle for decent vertex editing/combining or a cleaner editor that didn't lag.

Also, I was reading about Adrian Eisenberg's Maya plugin but I haven't seen anything recently on his website or his forums about it's status (I am sure you are busy, by they way your Maya scripts are mindblowing Mr Eisenberg).

Is there a post that tells what formats and specifications must be met to use outside objects? It can be done with a script for blender3D (Yes, have been reading about your works Mr. Gomez, though I am not as versed in Blender3D as I need to be for this endevor) so there must be a way, some standards that can be used as a guideline.

Thank you all for your time, I have found these forums to be very friendly twards newer devlopers which is a blessing.

Zed

It can't be done.

J Gomez' work is along two lines:

1) An .obj (I believe) geometry reader that renders the resultant shape using one prim per vert - amusing, but generally impractical for most things because of the prim counts involved.

2) A plugin for blender which lets you use it as an offline builder - but the thing is, your still building with prims. It just lets you play with prims in blender, basicly, then export them to SL. It doesn't let you just export a model, you don't have any real advantage over SL except the ability to work offline.

AH, ok, so you still have to use the basic Shapes, but you can just do it outside of the game?

Even that would be an advantage to me, as it would be done with controls I know and all that wonderful stuff.

Can you explain some things for me? Am i correct that Prim = Shape primitive (Cube, Sphere, Cone)? Because if that is correct, then I am confused as thoes shapes have to have more than a singel vertex to maintain the shape.

When you say "prim counts" do you mean the number of primitive shapes involved, or the number of polygons (faces) involved?

Thank you for your reply,
Zed

Hi Zed,

The primitive shapes are -- Cube, Sphere, Cone etc. There are several ways to manipulate each prim in order to create something unique toward your intended design. It's a matter of playing with path cuts, hollow, twist, taper, shear, profile cut, radius delta.

No matter how much you configure 1 prim -- it still counts as 1 prim. Once you create another prim or copy the original one to make second copy of it....it counts as 2 prims.

Polygons are faces on a prim -- no matter the shape of the prim.
Prims are individual pieces that you either had to 'create' or copy.

So if you had square prim.....and tapered/sheared/twisted and hollowd out...it would have many polygons associate with it...but its still 1 prim.

If you have the chance.....go to The Ivory Tower. They have a fantastic display of prims and how it can be manipulated. Also gives you a good understanding of how things work.


EispoO

Ok. If you've used Maya, you've probably dabbled in 3ds before. The SL prims are like 3ds parametric primitives. You can apply modifiers to them into a modifier stack like bending, squashing and twisting, but you can't actually alter the vertices until you collapse the object into an editable mesh. Maya primitives are instantly modifyable tho.

Where's the Ivory Tower?

I'm not new to modeling, but SL's tools seem a bit odd to me.

It is at least theoretically possible to model in Maya and convert an arbitrary mesh to SL prims.

The math is somewhat complex, but there are several good Siggraph papers on mesh decomposition. You would create a model, build it however you want, and then a plugin would convert it into approprate prims for export to SL.

Actually, it's one prim per face, not one prim per vertex. Basically, it takes every triangle from you OBJ mesh, and builds an identically sized triangular prim in its place.

This can work very well for bringing Maya models into SL, Zed, but in order to use it effectively, you have to do your initial modeling with SL's limitations in mind. For example, make sure the length and width of every individual triangle is no greater than 10 units, keep your poly counts as low as is humanly possible, etc., and then be prepared to do a lot of cleanup work afterwards to make the model actually be prim-efficient.



The problem as I see it is not necessarily the math, but the inteligence of the computer. There can be any number of radically different ways to stitch together any given object, and which combination of prims is best can vary in accordance with the object's intended function. How is any automated system to be trusted to judge what prim choices to go with when it's inherently incapable of understanding all the human-factor variables of functionality and workflow in a dynamic world like SL?

For a simple example, it would be difficult to imagine a system capable of judging when it's best to construct a large curved section of an object out of cut tubes or cut cylinders or both. There are advantages and disadvantages to each in every situation, ranging from ease of texturing to behavior of physics. How is the computer to know what's best? It takes an experienced human with an overlying sense of the end goal to make those kinds of decisions.

Don't get me wrong; I'd love to be able to just push a button and instantly convert a complex mesh model into a collection of prims, all cut & tapered & fitted together, and ready to go. I just can't see it happening without my having to go in afterwards and fix a whole bunch of things to make up for the computer's limited judgment capacity, in much the same way I ALWAYS have to do now whenever I do something like, say, convert NURBs to polygons, which is infinitely simpler than what we're talking about here.

So yeah, I'd agree it's theoretically possible to make it work. I just don't think it's at all possible to make it work WELL. The amount of repair-work needed could easily negate any time savings over just building a prim model from scratch in the first place.

I hate to be such a naysayer, but that's just how I see it on this one.


Anyway, Zed, if you're interested in Jeffrey's OBJ importer (which I actually prefer to call a "translator", not an "importer, since it's not actually bringing anything in, but rebuilding things completely anew in a totally different system), you can get it here. If you're curious about what people have in the works for Maya in particular, check out what Adrian Eisenberg's been working on. I've been foaming at the mouth, waiting for Adrian to finish that thing.

Go to Search > All > type in Ivory Tower.
It will give you a teleport link to the parcel.

Coords are:
Natoma 210, 164, 27



EispoO

Zed,

I understand your frustration coming in from Lightwave/Bryce. No orthogonal views, no meshes, not even boolean operations. That said, it is way cool to be able to watch someone do a build in world, participate in a class where everyone is building the same thing, and jointly build a project. All of these you cannot do in Maya et. all.

That said, check out this thread, which offers an Blender plug-in to build in RL and an importer to bring things in-world. I have not personnally tried these as I'm adjusting to the in-world techniques.

/8/64/110607/1.html

Ansel

I don't have experience with Maya, but I do with AutoCAD. I am new to SL too and am struggling really hard to be productive. It takes forever to do the simplest things. I would be happy with at least being able to snap objects from point to point (midpoint, endpoint, intersection, etc.).

Yeah yeah, brain-to-fingers translation error.

I come from a Maya / XSI creating background and was quite disappointed with the lack of any sort of mesh import. At least for characters this is a "must" and I hope there is something better coming out with the work being done on the avatar/anim changes in the works. I smashed my head against many keyboards to make myself a half decent primitive avatar that I had to shoehorn into the non-editable human skeleton provided. I gave up after realizing it will take months to texture my avatar without seams.


As for building structures the current system is quite good except "I hope" someone from LL would just try a level editor such as Half Life's map editor (hammer) or something similar and implement ideas from those. Especially the texture placement tools.