Maya Modeling - Sculptie

Hello everyone,

As I stated into sculpting in Maya, I mainly design with Polygons, and you are only able to use nurbs for sculpting in second life. Is there a way to use polygons, a tutorial to help me with nurbs?

Thanks,
Don

You can use Polygons, but with some effort. And its not always successful. I've had mixed results with 'em.

First, the UV Map should fit neatly in a square.

Second, the UV Mapping should be a Sphere. Just seems to work best.

If all else fails, try Creating a NURBS Sphere. Add in any number of Sections & Spans (in tool settings).

Another useful thing, working with the Control Vertices and inserting IsoParms where needed.

For general shaping & turning I use a Deformation Latice. Again, add as many control points as you might need.

THings export best when broken into parts: finger, hand, thumb, instead of 1 whole object.

Hope that helps somewhat. I'm no NURBS modeler myself.

Don, NURBS are a far superior choice when modeling sculpties since the complex rainbow gradient in the sculpt maps "resembles" the b-splines used to form a NURBS surface. When modeling with polygons, you should not extrude an edge or surface, merge verts, or delete faces (since those will make the UV coordinates unuseable by the sculpt map exporter).

And be wary of using a large number of spans in any direction. SL cannot display the detail that Maya can! So I'd stick to using no more than 20 spans in either direction (plus it makes sculpting the surface a whole lot less complicated).

So...

The good thing is that NURBS are easier to work with for beginners (at least in small, basic jobs like Second Life sculpties)! You must be familiar with the RMB radial menu options for a polygon mesh (faces, verts, edges, etc.)? Well, RMB click on a NURBS and different options will appear: Control Verts, Isoparms, Hulls, etc. You will be interested in the control verts. Select this option, and try clicking on one or more of the pink dots that appear. When you reposition, scale, or rotate these points, the NURBS surface will bend in a nice bezier curve rather than in rigid sections like with polygons.

1) Start with a NURBS sphere or cylinder
2) Switch to Control Vertex mode
3) Select one or more "CVs" and tweak them (see other tweaking methods below)
4) Export the surface

That's really all you need to do! Seriously! There are other advanced NURBS modeling techniques, but they will produce a surface which is sliced up and unuseable by SL. You'll find that sculpties are actually an almost juvenile outlet for using such a powerful program as Maya.

It makes little sense to use a lattice deformer on a NURBS surface. Lattice deformers are better for polygons since those don't already deform smoothly like NURBS do. You're better off using the CVs themselves to acquire more exact control over your model.

Other tools (slightly more advanced) which you may use are the SCULPT GEOMETRY ARTISAN TOOL (hotbox > Edit NURBS > Options) or the LINEAR DEFORMATION TOOLS (under the modeling menuset). These tools, however, require that you adjust multiple settings with somewhat obscure names. And they go beyond what I can easily explain in a discussion forum!

The good news is...
I'm working hard to open a great big sculptie gallery in world, and it will be complete with self-paced, in world tutorials specific to Maya. Look for my post in the coming weeks announcing the grand opening of this new training/shoping/browsing facility.

And have fun in Maya! It's a fantastic program!

Okay, thanks both of you. I have done some expirmenting and I made a good hoverbike in maya, and loaded it up into SL. One thing, the front of it, I used sub-division surfaces becuase it was alot eaiser. The thing is, that won't export unless i covert everything back to nurbs. And if I were to do that, it would be a very hard puzzle pieace to solve. Any ideas to get it uploaded?

Wonderful. I look forward to visiting your gallery.

And thanks from someone learning to use Maya for the first time; I feel really encouraged.

Polygons sometimes work, depending on how many hoops you want to jump through, but subdivs don't, pretty much period.