Maya to second life stretching

does anyone know how to fix this?

Every time I export my sculpt textures from Maya and bring them into Second Life the Sculpt is stretched!! It does not maintain the proportions that it had in maya. This is becoming a big problem since I have a bunch of parts that need to be assembled together, and they all come into second life at different scales.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

I don't know how to do it in Maya yet (I just bought it today.. . YAY!) but it sounds like you need to define a bounding box, and export with it proportioned to that bounding box.

I could, of course, be completely wrong, and in any case someone more knowledgeable will come along and help, but that's what it sounds like to me.

Hi Keira
Goodluck with your maya, and thanks for comment. Already tried that, and so it must be something else

Keira, congrats on you Maya purchase.


Feather, here are the most common things people forget to do when exporting sculpt maps from Maya:

1. Remove transformation data and construction history from all objects right before you export them. To do this, select the object(s), and then click Modify -> Freeze Transformaions; Modify -> Reset Transformations; Edit -> Delete by type -> History. If you forget to do this, your sculpties will come out messed up in any number of ways.

2. Turn on Correct Orienation and Maximize Scale in the exporter dialog. If you don't see both of those checkboxes, it's probably because there's a scrollbar in the way of one or both. This is due to a typo in the script. Search in the script for the word "scrollable". If there's a one next to it, change the one to a zero. Then re-save and re-run the script. The scrollbar will disappear, and you'll see all the checkboxes. Maximize Scale is important in order to make sure your sculpty comes out the same apparent size in SL that it is in Maya. Correct Orienation keeps it from exporting inside-out.


If you've been doing both those things already, then I'm not sure what the problem might be.

Thankies =P

I spend three months with blender, and learn to love it.

I spend 4 hours with Maya and learn to need it XD


Tay, done derailing

Hi Chosen Few,

Thanks so much for the detailed response, really helpful.
Still getting the same problem after doing the things you said.
We are using a polygon sphere, chopping the top off and then snapping the top to a point, then we are using a latice modifier to mould the desired shape.
What is the ideal starting object ? NURBS ? Polys ? I would prefer Polys as it's a far more realistic option for me.
Thanks

I have to assume the problem is coming from having cut off pieces of the sphere. Did you normalize your UV map after doing that? Do you still have the correct number of faces?

In any case, the Maya sculpty exporter is really optimized for NURBS. You'll find that it works much more cleanly and reliably with NURBS than with polys. NURBS modeling is insanely easy once you get used to it. It's just a little different from poly modeling is all. It's a lot like working with vector paths in Photoshop or Illustrator, only in 3D.

If you'd really rather use polys, I'd suggest using a sculpty exporter that is optimized for polygons in particular. The Wings exporter is a good one.

In theory, you should be able to import the Wings template spheres into Maya (assuming Maya is where you prefer to do your modeling), and then export the resulting model back to Wings for sculpt map generation. I've never tried it though. Assuming it does work, the only drawback would be you won't be able to use the automated assemblers if you're making multi-sculpty objects, since those require the sculpt map export to come straight from Maya.

I'm not sure what you mean about polygons being "more realistic", by the way. Care to elaborate?