Maya guide please!

Ok I been messing around with maya for a few weeks or so and am slowly understanding what to do with this and that.
but after watching a digital tutors tutorial of a shoe model in which he used a polygon cube and added a few subdivisions and heights and started moving and scaling to make a shoe base.
Im wondering if this is possible to do for a second life sculptie?

Also!
I read a few SL tutorials where the extrude factor was used, but then I read you cant use it for sl ? which one goes? lol!
And i've drawn a black all of a sudden , in maya how do I is it subdivide? to have more verts? or to smooth it ? I may be thinking this is possible because I been looking at some poly tutorial lol..

Not sure if this can be done in maya.

Im sure as I go along I would ask alot more questions.

Some help would be GREAT so I can start modelling proper shapes

Technically, the answer is yes, but I wouldn't recommend it. First, the Maya sculpty exporter is optimized for NURBS, and isn't all that accurate with polygons. Second, in order to work as a sculpty, the object will need a perfect UV space, and sculpty-compatible topology. Generally speaking, cubes offer neither. It would take an awful lot of work to turn a cube-based model into something that could be usable as a sculpty.

The best way to make sculpties in Maya is by deforming NURBS spheres.

If you want to us polygons, I suggest starting with a capless cylinder. Normalize the UV's, and then snap the top and bottom rows of vertices to single points, in order to form poles. I

f you only have a few weeks worth of experience with Maya, you might not know what I've been talking about so far. If that's the case, I'd say take a step back. Learn more about Maya itself, and about 3D modeling in general, before you attempt to make sculpties. Sculpties are quite unique. If you learn the basics of modeling in Maya first, then transitioning to sculpties afterwards will be relatively easy. But if you try to learn to make sculpties without first mastering the basics, you're destined for frustration. Don't put the cart before the horse, tempting as it may be. Take your time, and learn in the right order.



Extrusion modeling won't work for sculpties, generally speaking. You're almost guaranteed to end up with incompatible topology, and an imperfect UV layout.

As Jeffrey Gomez often puts it, sculpties are basically origami. Just as origami models are created by bending, folding, and otherwise deforming flat pieces of paper, sculpties are made by deforming existing primitive shapes. (Note, the spheres, cylinders, and toruses which are the usual starting points for sculpties are themselves nothing more than pre-deformed planes.)




Before I answer this, let me stress two things. First, as I said a minute ago, most of the usual techniques of poly modeling are not applicable to sculpties. Second, the fact that you're unaware of how to do things as basic as subdivisions and smoothings suggests that you're not yet ready to be doing sculpties. You really need to learn all the basics first. Otherwise, you're just going to keep running into more and more stumbling blocks.

I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but it's the best advice I can give. Go through all the tutorials in the Help file (and I do mean ALL of them), from start to finish, before you try to do anything else with sculpties.

That said, since you asked, there are many different ways to do subdivisions and smoothings. I'll give you a couple of quick ones.

To subdivide, you can either change the number of divisions in the object's shape node's input channels (via the channel box), or you can use the command Edit Mesh -> Add Divisions. To smooth, use the command Edit Mesh -> Smooth.

A few things to note:

1. There are options boxes for nearly all menu commands. To open one, click the little box icon directly to the right of a command's name on the menu. Options boxes are where you set the parameters for every command that is adjustable. Use them.

2. "Edit Mesh" only exists in versions 8.0 and newer of Maya. In older versions, it's "Edit Polygons".

3. If you don't see either Edit Mesh or Edit Polygons at the top of the screen, you must be looking at the wrong menu section. To switch sections, use the white dropdown menu at the upper left of the screen. It must be set to Polygons in order to see polygon-related commands. Other sections are Animation, Surfaces, Rendering, and Dynamics. If you have Maya Unlimited, you'll also have an nCloth section. If it's Maya Complete, nCloth won't be there.

heya
Thanks for your reply chosen I totally forgot to mention I already have been making sculpties since last year and kind of know wings like the back of my hand lol! Also dabbled in a few other programs like max and blender.
I just feel like im soooo limited with wings3d now that I need to bench off from it and get abit more advanced.

I design mostly shoes and well, anything else I can use a sculptie for

Also come to think of it ..what if i was to create the objects I needed in wings and import the obj into maya? would that work?

You can also use nurbs planes, cylinders or tori, but you need to change the base sculpt type in SL to have them map correctly. (Otherwise they will be mapped onto spheres.)

See my response here:

/8/ab/274585/1.html#post2095235

Also this could sometimes require you to change the resulting UV-map in PS, by mirroring they RGB channels. (or any other graphics tool that allows you to individually manipulate the channels.)