Maya's poor sculpt map quality

Does anyone know of theres a better sculpt map exporter for maya? because as convenient as Qarl's exporter is, the sculpt maps it creates usually look nothing like what you were trying to export. Just try to make a sharp edge and youll know what I mean, because it is impossible.

So, has anyone created any accurate sculpt map exporters? I heard the one for Blender was supposed to be good, But I couldnt get past its horrible layout and bad controls.

Anyway, hopefully someone has heard of something.

It's not impossible. I make sharp edges all the time. You just need to know how to use it. Here are a few things you must always do:

1. Prior to export, delete history, freeze transformations, reset transformations, and then delete history again. You must do this for every object you are exporting, no exceptions. It is absolutely crucial, or else your sculpties will be all kinds of messed up. Do not skip this step, ever.

2. Make sure lossless upload is turned on when you upload.

3. If you're using NURBS, then to make a sharp corner, you have to overlap at least three isparms. This is one of the basic tenets of NURBS modeling.

4. Make sure your mesh size is right. For NURBS, that means 16 sections and 15 spans. For polygons, that means 33x32 vertices. Any larger, and you won't be able to capture all the detail in the sculpt map.

5. If you're using polygons, you must ensure your objects each have a perfect UV space. Maya spheres by default do not. You'll have to remap them before they're usable.

6. Always export sculpt maps at 64x64 px.



Follow those rules, and everything will work out just fine. Skip over any of them, and you'll likely have problems.

I personally have found it very beneficial to make sure that I model everything to size .. ie the size it would be in SL without scaling. I'd have to go back and check but as far as I can recall the default grid size is 1cm in Maya so keep everything inside the 1 meter size and it will make it easier.

Just to clarify on Dante's point about sizing, be aware that the names of the Maya grid units don't matter. Depending on how you have your preferences set, the units could be named "meters" or "centimeters" or "inches" or whatever. But none of that actually changes anything for our purposes here. As far as making sculpties goes, the names of the units are completely arbitrary. A unit is a unit.

In SL, a unit happens to be called a "meter", but that too is just a name. If your units in Maya happen to be called something else, they'll still line up 1:1 with SL's "meters". So, for example, if your Maya units are called "centimeters", don't expect to be able to make an object 100cm long in Maya, and then have it be 1 meter long in SL. That's not how it works. If an object covers one unit in Maya, no matter what the unit is called, it will cover one meter in SL.

And since the maximum object size in SL is 10x10x10 meters, don't make any one sculpty source object any larger than 10x10x10 units in Maya.

Chosen Few: "5. If you're using polygons, you must ensure your objects each have a perfect UV space. Maya spheres by default do not. You'll have to remap them before they're usable."

What does this mean?

How do I remap the sphere?

Edit: the "Ant.ma" example from the wiki contains NURBS of all sizes and yet it is exported just fine. How is that? Any idea of how that ant was modeled? Was it converted to NURBS? or modeled directly with NURBS?

Thanks.

Good point .. I hadn't thought it all the way through to that point. Sure makes modelling for SL easier when you use that though.