Hard edges in maya

i've beeen working in maya for a while making curvy organic stuff from manipulating the CV, hulls of a sphere and so far and havn't had a problem. Now i've started trying to make nurbs with a few hard edges but it has resaulted in crinkling along the wedge. Does anybody know if i'm using to many spans (vertical or horizontal ?). I usually rebuild the nurbs surface and add a few more spans in both planes. If that's not the case where is this crinkling coming form ?

okay what i've found is that the more vert / hori spans you have the more crinkly and uneven your sculpt will look in sl. However i have seen some sculpts that have really hard edges based on editing the textures map and making solid regions of colors. Does anybody know a link to a tutorial that involes working with the texture map and editing a sculpt that way ?

One way to do this would be, after exporting your sculpty from Maya, to import it into Wings 3D (where you have explicit control over the mesh) and sharpening things up where you want. There are numerous tutorials for using Wings 3D for sculpties, but I don't know of one specifically aimed at this use as a "post-processor" for Maya.

If you decide to try this, be warned that you have to make sure the sculpty bitmap size you are importing is 64x64, 32x32, or one of the smaller supported sizes. The current version of the sculpty importer will import a 128x128 bitmap with no complaints, but you won't be able to export the final result.

Also keep in mind that at 64x64, SL is only going to use about 1 out of every 4 vertices. If you make a sharp edge composed of vertices that SL isn't going to use, you'll lose the edge in SL. One way to deal with this is to double up all the vertices along a sharp edge (and quadruple vertices at a sharp point.)

There's no need to export to another program, or to edit the sculpt texture by hand. It's easy enough to make hard edges, directly in Maya.

One way would be to use a polygonal model instead of a NURBS model. Polygons, by defintion will always yield hard edges. There are a some caveats though. First, you'll likely need to do some UV editing to ensure that your poly model conforms to the perfect UV space that sculpties require. Second, due to LOD culling, you hard edges will disappear fast as your camera moves away from the object in SL. What looks nice and sharp from up close can look like a blob from 20 or 30 meters away.

The other way to do it is to stick with NURBS, and overlap the CV's. To make a hard edge with NURBS, you need at least 3 overlapping vertices. Overlapping 4 will effectively eliminate the LOD culling issues. There are 4 levels of detail for sculpties in SL. If you've got 4 vertices overlapped, then as they disappear one by one as the camera moves away, there will always be at least one remaining. Of course this limits the amount of detail you can get with a single sculpty, but generally it's worth the sacrifice. If you want hard edges from NURBS, vertex overlap is the only way.