2 Questions about adv. maya sculpt exporter

hey! i've been playing with the advanced maya exporter from the wikki. so far i've created a few multi-prim objects with baked lighting textures, and all is well, but i've run into a couple small issues. for the record, i am using maya 8.5 on windows xp, making everything out of lofted nurb circles and EP curves. i've done quite a bit in cinema4d, but i'm still a maya noob.

1) when exporting a group of objects, some of them will be "inside out", needing a horizontal texture flip, while others won't, so i'll have to manually correct half of the generated textures for my build. is there something that causes certain objects to be inverted but not others (order i select my circles before lofting, or their orientation mebbe?), or is this unavoidable?

2) the screenshot of the mel script interface shows a checkbox to "generate prim script" which i supposedly can paste into a sl script to reconstruct my model from the maya generated pieces, but i don't have the checkbox for that, nor does another friend of mine using windows. is this a mac only option, am i using an outdated script or something else?

3) once i loft a set of circles, if i select and move them, their skeleton stays behind, but still seems to move slightly with the surface, though i can't figure out what the relationship is. after adding several such objects to the screen, my interface gets kinda messy with all the detached skelleton circles all over the place. what's up with that? if i select each circle, then the surface, then move, they all seem to move together, but it becomes a pain to select all those pieces each time i want to scoot something.

thanks!

Heh, that's 3 questions, not 2.


You got it. It's the order in which you're selecting your curves for the loft. To avoid the problem altogther, I'd recommend not using lofts at all. Instead, always start with a NURBS sphere and deform it from there. Spherical topology is guaranteed always to work.

I'd recommend learning to use deformers You'll be able to work them in very much as you're used to doing with curves, only in reverse. Instead of making the curve first and then lofting the surface, make the surface first and then shape it with the deformers. It'll take just a little getting used to, but you'll find that deforming spheres in this way is extremely powerful and fast.


Chances are you've got a horizontal scrollbar in the way of that checkbox. Search the script for the word "scrollable". If there's a 1 next to it, change it to a 0.


When you want to move a lofted surface, it's best to move the curves, not the surface itself. Since the surface is interpolated from the curves, it will move automatically wherever you move the curves.

If you move the suface itself, then all you're doing is offsetting the distance at which the loft happens from the curves. As you noted the curves will remain behind (which is perfectly locigal if you think about it; you never actually told Maya you wanted the curves to move). Generally, it's not a good idea to move or otherwise edit lofted surfaces directly, at least not without deleting construction history first. (Deleting the history will remove the surface's relationship with the curves.)

Speaking of construction history, here's another good reason it's not a great idea to use lofts for sculpties. In order for the primscript export to work properly, all objects must have their transformations frozen and reset, and all construction history must be removed from them. Otherwise, you can end up with all sorts of undesirable results.

If you're depending on lofting to create the shapes you want, then as soon as you delete the history, you're losing your best method of editing a surface's shape, its dependency on the control curves. If you want to make a change later, you'll either have to re-loft another version of the shape to start over with, or you'll have to move vertices by hand.

However, were you using deformers all along, then deleting history wouldn't have all that much impact on you. It's something you'd be doing a hundred times anyway as you work. The history deletion will kill any existing deformers, and then to make a new change you just create a new deformer.

Deforming really is a much more efficient way to work than lofting, for a ton of reasons. Take it from someone who as a modeler used to loft almost everything, and now almost never lofts at all anymore. As I said, it takes a little getting used to since you have to reverse some of your present thinking, but once you make the switch, you'll never want to go back to lofting.

you rock chosen, thanks! and ya i kinda snuck that 3'rd question in after the fact! for the record, if i just deform a sphere, will the export script still be happy with it since it's closed at the poles?

It's supposed to be closed at the poles, so yes (assuming you're making normal sculpties, that is*).

Just don't forget the whole freeze transformations, reset transformations, delete history routine before export, and everything will be good.




* If you're using a scupt type other than sphere (i.e. the plane, torus, or cylinder type), then what I said about starting with a sphere does not apply. Start instead with the appropriate shape for your desired sculpt type. If you want to make a plane, start with a plane. Etc. For each type, deformers will still work better than lofts in most cases.

haha, i can work from other primitives and deformers? that's what i was used to in cinema, and i knew you could do it in maya, but i didn't think some random shape made that way could be exported easily with the exporter. i thought it required something specifically spherical....a solid object with exactly two poles, and i wasn't totally sure how i would specify those poles if i started from say...a cube or plane or anything except for lofted circles or a nurbs sphere

*tries this now*
ok yea, i can't just export a nurbs cube, least far as i can tell, though a sphere goes just fine. requires special adjustments after building to export non spherical based things?

A NURBS cube is actually six planes. If you want to export all six and reconstruct your cube in SL, you could, but there's not much point in that (unless you're just dying to have a cube in SL made from 11,531 polygons).

For most things, work with spheres. It's pretty easy to turn a sphere into cuboidal shape.

Here's my post on how we fixed most of the issues we encountered.
/8/25/213205/1.html#post1694824

Just read about this deformer business. I was wondering, are you using this for every sculptie shape that you create? I played around a bit but I can't imagine you could create something like a stiletto or something by just deforming a sphere with deformers. Isn't it very limited?

I don't use deformers for every last thing, no. There's no such thing as an all-in-one tool.


Play around a bit more. There's virtually nothing you can't make by deforming a sphere.

Here's a stiletto I just made in under 3 minutes, using nothing more than one NURBS sphere, a lattice deformer, and a simple ramp shader. The lattice is visible, so you can sort of see what it's doing.



It might not be the prettiest stiletto in the history of the world, but for less than three minutes of work, I think it came out ok.

Of course, you may have meant a stiletto healed shoe, rather than a stiletto knife, but that would have taken more than 3 minutes. It's absolutely doable though.



Not at all. Deformers are extremely powerful.

That's nice! What I actually meant by stiletto is a shoe though, sorry Like a pump actually, something like this: http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/206344/SID/231370/blFP/1

I'm currently trying to figure out how to even start with such a thing. My first thought was a loft of sorts until I saw this post.

A shape like that shoe is actually much simpler than you'd think. The fact that yours will be for an avatar instead of for a real person makes it even simpler (doesn't need an interior).

A shoe is nothing more than a tube. Your foot goes into one end, and the other end is at the bottom of the heel.Take a look at the wireframe on that Turbosquid page, and you can see that all the lines follow the basic tube shape.

Here's one way to approach it.


1. Start with something like this:



It's just a sphere, made cylindrical by scaling the horizontal hulls to be equal size.



2. Expand the upper portion like this:



The bottom part will become the heel, the upper part the shoe.



3. Rotate the upper portion to bend the shape in half like this:





4. Now begin stretching the differnt parts of the upper portion to sculpt the shape of a shoe:




You can see it's starting to take shape. This is after about 15 minutes of work. I don't have any more time to spend on this to finish it, but I think you get the idea.

You'll find that most shapes you think of as "complex" are actually really simple, just like this shoe.

Oh wow, that looks promising. Didn't even think I could sculpt it all in one, would have thought at least seperate mesh for the heel. And that's all deformer voodoo?

I actually didn't use any deformers for that. I just pushed and pulled vertexes and hulls around. The same thing could have been done with deformers though if I'd felt like it.

Right, well thank you so much for taking the time to write this up. Much appreciated. And you have my admiration for sure

Sorry for the necro Chosen, but this image has vanished. You don't happen to still have it? It seems odd that it's the only one missing, so I wonder if you accidentally deleted it (in which case, imageshack images are never permanently deleted and restored quite easily).

I understand if you can't find it or are unable to restore it. And thank you for such a useful history of help & tutorials!

Retro

But you should not be too disappointed to see that the final sculpty will get much rougher than the model. My own experience with shoes told me to make it with at least 3 sculpties or even with a combination of simple prims and sculpties:

- one for the heel part
- one for the bottom part (the sole)
- one (or even more) for the top part

The main problem i always have is that due to the special properties of sculpties i never can get my shoes to look really nice when i try to make them out of one sculpty only. It may be my inability to know how to do it though... well, much of the roughness could be eliminated with a good texture...

Hi Retro. No, I don't still have that image. I also did not delete it from imageshack. If you know of a way to restore it, I'm all ears. My understanding was that they autodelete after a certain amount of time after the last viewing.

In any case, the missing step is a pretty simple one. Just grab all but the lower few hulls, and then upscale the whole selection. The end result will be what looks like a fat cylinder with a smaller skinny cylinder sticking out of the bottom.


Gaia, one-prim shoes are certainly doable. It jut just depends on how much detail is required. For something relatively simple, like a pump or a plain boot, it's no problem. For something fancier with more parts to it, like straps, laces, buckles, open toes, etc., then additional prims will be needed.

Also, it makes a difference if the shoe will need to go on a store shelf or not. If it doesn't, then it's a lot easier. There's no need to worry about the interior, since the avatar's foot will cover it. You don't really need a hole for the foot to fit through; you just need the texturing of the edge areas to hint that the hole is there, even though it's not.

But if the shoe does need to be able to stand alone for a display, sans foot, then the interior has to be there. That usually means extra prims; all the parts have to be present, no faking it. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, a lot of people just aren't able to think about the fact that the interior is just a waste of resources, since the only time anyone's going to see the shoe outside the store is when its worn. Since people's vision tends to be so limited, we have to do what we have to do, even though we know it's silly.

Thank you for explaining that Chosen!

With regards ImageShack, there are still pics in my "deleted images" bin that I deleted two years ago, so I'm surprised about the auto-deletion thing.

If they're not in your deleted images folder (http://my.imageshack.us/u_images.php), I guess they've gone for good. Never mind, and thanks again for explaining.

I don't actually have an account with imageshack. I just use the free service. That's probably the difference.

Oh yeah. I forgot that you don't have to register. ^^;