Maxlike projection in Maya - Chosen?

Chosen (or anyone else for that matter)

Do you know of a similar workflow to what Chip used within max (Max's projection) to create his one prim sculpty head? I've kind of hunted around but not come across anything that looks like the same thing so I'm not sure if Maya has a similar capability or not.

Anyone know?

I haven't read through that particular tutorial, since I'm not really a Max user, but I'm guessing what Chip did in it was he probably used the head of the avatar mannequin model to create a normal map for the lower poly sculpty, to fool the lighting/shading into making look as if the sculpty object has as much geometry in it as the avatar head, even though it doesn't. It's basically the "smoke and mirrors" approach to game modeling, and it can be very effective for real time environments like SL.

Assuming that is indeed what that tutorial is about, then depending on what version of Maya you're using, the tool you're looking for is called either Surface Sampler or Transfer Maps. You'll find it in the Modify menu. Here's a good video tutorial for how to use it: http://www.digitaltutors.com/digital_tutors/video_details.php?v=713

If I'm wrong about what Chip did in his tutorial, perhaps someone else will explain. I don't have time to read through it right at the moment. Sorry.

If I understand it correctly what Max is doing is baking a texture map from one object and mapping it to another one wrapped around the first one. Max is wrapping a sphere around the outside of the surface you want to duplicate then projecting the texture map from the first surface onto the surrounding sphere. Kind of like normal maps I think.