Polygon - Texture

I've been trying to get a polygon mesh on secondlife (sculpted from a poly sphere) and everything went fine, even uploaded the 3dmap to SL and looked great/decent just with the 3d map untextured within maya, when i tried to texture, i used UV map editor made the proper cuts where goes where and the geometry and texture inside maya look good after building the texture and assigning to the geometry, the problem is now when i try to upload the 3dmap and upload to SL comes also looking like the uv texture. (i'm using the "sculpt.mel" way to upload my 3d maps

the texture comes all black edges with the cuts showing with the 3d representation only inside each hole spaces..

any solutions?

(i am a bit rusty on maya and i am far worse explaining things...feel free to try help, or IM or email if you think of anything)

ty in advance

ps: Leben ty for the patience, i knew you were really busy inworld and still answered me

I'm having trouble understanding your description of the problem. How about some screenshots?

He's likely working with a polyCube as his base starting object and trying to export with the sculpty.mel script. Which unfortunately results in the bmp looking like a upside down T because of the UV maps, with black filling the area where there is no UV.

no. my "base starting object" is a poly sphere, i may be having issues between the 3d map and texture itself which i tried again today but the result was the same..

(hopefully anyone will be able to open the link)

http://i31.tinypic.com/ih8c9k.jpg

I'm still not sure if I understand the problem correctly, so I'll just stick to some basic caveats:

- The Maya exporter does not work well with polygons at all. I recommend to use NURBS objects (use 16x15 or 32x31 spans x section NURBS spheres to start modeling from).

- If you absolutely need to use polygons, there's a workflow from Maya to Blender, using the .dae format to get your Maya poly object into Blender and export it there with Domino's high precision Blender sculpty scripts. Check this out:

/8/3d/321183/1.html#post2480229

Cheers,
-L

When you say "3D map", I assume you mean the sculpt map?

As for why the sculpt map in your link came out the way it did, all I can say is your UV'ing is hopelessly wrong. Why exactly that's the case, I have no idea. When I asked for screenshots, what I was hoping you'd provide would be an image of your source model, preferably displayed in wireframe-on-shaded mode, as well as a shot of the UV texture editor, so we can see how you UV'ed it. Without that information, it's impossible to tell you what you DID wrong, only that it IS wrong.

So you know, all sculpties require a perfect UV space. It has to be a uniform grid, covering the entire canvas. It can't have any individual shells or any unused space. Remember, a sculpty is nothing more than a plane, folded in 3D space, like origami. It has to be unfoldable to a perfect rectangle, or it's not a sculpty.

This is why sculpties were first developed with NURBS in mind for the source modeling, rather than polygons. NURBS models, by definition, are always unfoldable into rectangles, and always have a perfect UV space.

The Maya sculpty exporter is optimized for NURBS. It's not set up very well to deal with polygons. If you plan on using Maya extensively for sculpties, I'd suggest you switch over to NURBS modeling now. It will save you a lot of headaches.

If you're not familiar with NURBS modeling, it just takes a little getting used to. You'll need to develop some new habits if all you've ever known is poly modeling. But once you get the hang of it, you'll find it to be very fast and easy.

I was actually trained on NURBS before polygons in school, since I happened to have a professor who was a NURBS guy for my introductory classes. NURBS are second nature to me, which is probably why I took to sculpties so quickly. Most people have the opposite experience, though. Poly modeling is a lot more open ended, so learning the NURBS-like restrictions of sculpties can be a little frustrating at first for most people. But learning it will make you a far more diverse modeler, both in and out of SL. Knowledge of NURBS workflow, in addition to polygonal workflow, is important. It's well worth the investment of effort.




I used to recommend 16x15 back when sculpties were new, out of concern that SL could mishandle the poles with an even 16x16. But since then, I've found that that concern was unwarranted, and that 16x16 actually works a bit better than 16x15.

I'm not a fan of going as high as 32 unless you're very consciously aware of the geometric limitations of sculpties. For the experienced, it's fine, but for those new to sculpties, I strongly suggest sticking with 16 or less.




Thanks for that, Leban. I'll have to give it a whirl. I'd been using my own variation on Logan Bauer's method for polygonal sculpts (outlined at http://forums.secondlife.com/showpost.php?p=2345381&postcount=11), which works well, but is tedious. Using Blender as a proxy sounds like it would speed things up.


And once again, I'll take the opportunity to state that there is still money on the table for any programmer out there who would be willing to tackle the job of adding good polygon support to the Maya sculpty exporter. I can't believe it could be that difficult of a task. IM me in-world if you want the job. My forum account has been broken for years, so I can't access PM's here.