Maya to Zbrush to SL workflow?

Is there a way to start with nurbs in Maya and then go to zbrush or mudbox then to SL?

Zbrush and Mudbox cannot use NURBS. They're polygon-only. If you want to export from Maya to either one, you first need to convert your model to polys.

I guess I asked incorrectly I knew Zbrush and Mudbox cant handle nurbs, what I wasn't sure about was if I converted the nurbs to a poly object would it still load ok in SL or are there more steps involved that I need to do to make it work correctly.

I just ran a test with Sculpty Maker 2.4 and it looks as if you can create your initial object (for example, a 32x33 Sphere3D) in Zbrush, then send it on over to Maya as an .obj file, then after manipulation, export as an .obj again and turn into a sculpt map with Sculpty Maker. The only catch is that sometimes the sculpty inverts, which you can fix in Photoshop with a quick Cntrl-I on the mess.

All right, here's the object files I made. To use them, you need to unzip them (Winzip has a free trial if you don't have it already). You will also need SculptyMaker, which you can get here:
http://www.shiny-life.com/sculpty-maker/

Caveat: I never updated past 2.4 because it worked fine for me. I presume it still will work for later versions, but one never knows

Then:

1) Import the needed .obj to Maya

2) Create your masterpiece. Standard sculpty rules apply, no deleting or adding vertices, no extruding, yatatatata

3) Export as an .obj file

4) Use SculptyMaker to create a sculptmap. If you turn off "scale" and "centre" it will be positioned and sized as it is in your Maya scene. On the other hand, leaving those on will maximize your use of the bounding box. As an aside, I've never found the need for a sculptmap beyond 64x64, so I just leave the size slider there.

5) Go into Photoshop (or what have you) and invert the colours (Cntrl-I. I forget where it actually is on the menus ) If you skip this step, the sculpty will look inside out. It will also flip the sculpty upside down-- I think if you flip the map vertically it will fix that.

That's really all!

Hum. The sphere file didn't attach again. I'll have to try again later.

Thank you I will give these a try