Maya: which version?

Silker, here are the common causes of issues that fit your description. If they don't solve the problem, please post a screenshot of both the source model and the resulting sculpty, so we can see what's going on.


1. Make sure you have Correct Orientation checked in the exporter dialog. If you don't, your sculpt map will be rotated 90 degrees, which often results in V-shaped gouges in the sculpty surface.

Just so you know, the need for Correct Orientation is due to the development history of sculpties. When they first hit the beta grid, they were oriented 90 degrees counter to how they are now. A while later, they were changed to their present orientation. The Correct Orientation checkbox was added at that time, so that both old and new style sculpties could be made with the same script. Nowadays, there's not much point in having the option to uncheck Correct Orientation, but the script has not been edited to get rid of it. Keep it checked at all times.


2. Make sure to clear history and transformation info before you export. Select all surfaces you wish to export, and then click the following commands:

Edit -> Delete by type -> History
Modify -> Freeze Transformations
Modify -> Reset Transformations
Edit -> Delete by type -> History

If history and transformations are present, the exporter won't be able to get an accurate scan of the surface shape. Do not forget to clear that stuff out before you export.


3. Make sure to use the correct stitching type in-world. However your source model is stitched, the in-world version must be stitched the same way. Here are all the options:

Sphere means that the top and bottom edges are each collapsed to poles, and the two side edges are stitched together.

Cylinder means the two side edges are stitched together, and the top and bottom edges are unstitched.

Torus means the two side edges are stitched together, and the top and bottom edges are also stitched together.

Plane means all edges are unstitched.



To answer your questions about that cylon model, yes, it's made of multiple NURBS surfaces. It's about 180 deformed spheres.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "snap the objects together to make it look seamless". It's not a patch model, if that's what you mean. It's just a bunch of spheres.

To give you an idea, here's an exploded view of the head. Each object you see is a deformed sphere:



Quite obviously, this is an extremely inefficient way to model. But that's pretty much how it is with sculpties. They are what they are. Until we get real mesh support in SL, this kind of thing is the best we can do.

Thanks for your reply chosen and i've decided its much easier to just deform the nurb shapes in maya. I've been messing around with a bat that I have made and it looks pretty good though The texturing of it doesn't look all that great i think I will need to change the geometry so that i get more nurbs patches on areas of the sculpt where i want most of the detailed texturing at and least amount of patches where detail isn't too important. Here is a link to a bat i made with a 16x16 texture grid on it in both SL and Maya.

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/attachments/content-creation/6257d1236093472-mayas-paint-effects-second-life-sl_maya_bat.jpg


What i am also curious about is the 3d paint tool. Can you use that to import sculpties into SL?

THanks in advance for any replies

PS. Btw here is a really noob question.. How are you guys posting url links in your posts?

You have to wrap the link in "" tags instead of "" and "" ones. If you preview text before you save it, or if you go back in and edit a post, the tags get all screwed up, so you have to redo them. It's a pain, but it works.

Silker, if you want me to take a look at your image, please post somewhere that is publicly accessible. I do not have an SLU account, nor do I want one at this time. If you need a suggestion for an image hosting site, imageshack.us and picoodle.com are two that I use quite a bit. They're both free.

I'm not sure what you're trying to ask about the 3D Paint tool. Can you rephrase the question? It's a Maya tool, not an SL tool, obviously, so it can't do anything directly in SL, let alone import stuff. What exactly did you mean?

Sorry let me clearify the question. Can you import the objects created with the 3D paint tool as sculpties in SL via maya scene plugin.

And here is a new link to the bat.

What objects do you mean? Are you creating 3D Paint Effects? I thought you were talking about using artisan brushes to paint textures on surfaces.

If you are talking about 3D Paint Effects, then the answer is no, those won't work for sculpties. Paint Effects are completely unique to Maya. They can't exist in any other program.

If you want to export 3D Paint Effects to other programs, you must first convert them to polygons or NURBS. They still won't likely work for sculpties, though, as there's little chance they'll end up structured the way sculpties require. If you want a model to become a sculpty, it MUST be created with sculpties in mind from start to finish.



Looks like you linked just the thumbnail, not the full size image. That is, unless you meant it to be so small. Please link a larger version.

updated the link on the previous post. And thanks for answering the question

Looking at the larger pic, I don't see much problem with the way you've got the isoparms distributed. If you feel you need more detail in a certain area, though, then by all means, move more isoparms to that area.

Careful with terminology, by the way. You don't actually have any NURBS patches in that model. A NURBS patch model is created by stitching a bunch of smaller individual NURBS surfaces (patches) together, along their edges, the same way a quilt in RL is made from stitching cloth patches together. Your model does not fit that description at all. It's a single contiguous surface. There are no patches present.




If you want more information on patch modeling, take a look at this tutorial: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/modeling/nurbs/159.html . Note, it's got nothing to do with sculpties. Don't expect it to help you in that regard.

Just so you know, patch modeling used to be a very common practice in the flim industry (Terminator 2, for example), but the wealth improvements to polygonal modeling and subdiv modeling tools and tedhniques that have arisen over the past decade or so have made patch modeling largely obsolete.

with that said about terminology what would this part of the sphere be called, between where 2 spans and sections meet. In polygon terms it would be called a face but what would it be called in nurbs term?

Technically, it would be called a patch, so you weren't exactly wrong to use that word. I just think that whenever a word has more than one definition, it should be used with caution, to avoid confusion. I guess I wasn't clear in my earlier explanation. Sorry if I caused any confusion myself. Let me attempt to clarify.

When discussing modeling technique, people tend to talk about the components of a model that they can control directly. So when you said "get more NURBS patches on the area", I thought you were saying you had built a patch model out of multiple surfaces, and that you were now going to add even more surfaces to it. But that wasn't what you meant at all, which became clear when you showed the picture. What you were actually talking about was moving more hulls (rows of vertices) into a particular area.

To "get more patches" in an area, in the sense that you meant it, one would either add isoparms (not a good idea for sculpties), or else move more CV's or hulls into that area. The end result would be more patches than you had before, if that's how you want to look at it, but the methodology was to concentrate on the elements that are directly controllable, like vertices and isoparms. The patches are just along for the ride, if you follow me.

This may seem like a "six of one, half a dozen of the other" kind of thing, but if you have conversations like this often enough, you'll find that it's not trivial. If you say soething like "add patches to an area", 99.99% of modelers would think you're talking about introducing additional surfaces. But if you say something like "put more isoparms in that area", they'll know exactly what you mean.

Again, sorry if I was unclear before in my meaning. I hope it makes more sense now.

It does make more sense now that its more clear, And your right lots of these modeling words have more then one meaning and its easy to get the word mixed up if the wording is wrong which i should of been more clear in my post. but many thanks for your help in both posts you've been great!. Anyways I've made another baseball bat with 3 prims ill post in world screenshots of it and maya after im finished retexturing it. My maya crashed after trying to export the sculpt+textures, good thing i saved the scene right before i textured it eh.

So, it seems the heavens have smiled upon me as I have had the good fortune to buy Maya at a great price from a friend who's studio had an extra, unused license. Yay!

I've now spent 2 days immersed in online tutorials (lynda.com rocks!) and I'm loving loving loving everything! I obviously still have a very long way to go, but for the first time I truly *understand* what's going on and what the program is doing. The interface is complex but logical and intuitive. In Blender I mostly wandered around in the dark and anything I managed to model was almost by sheer accident.

Anyways, I wanted to ask for suggestions on things I need to read, especially Maya-for-SL instructions, tutorials, etc. I've found the importer scripts, but very little in the way of tutorials -- am I missing something obvious here?

Also, any killer plug-ins you could recommend? From what I understand from this thread, Turtle seems like must.

Thank you!!
-Milla

Congrats, Milla. I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it so much.

For reading material, the introductory tutorials in the Help file are the best place to start. Lynda.com has good stuff as well, as you've already discovered. Highend3d.com also has a nice collection of tutorials and assorted goodies. It won't all be directly applicable to SL, of course, but the more you learn about using Maya itself, the easier you'll be able to intuit what will and won't work for sculpties.

For sculpty-specific instruction, this forum and the sculpty wiki are still the best sources right now. That may be changing soon, though. I don't want to spill the beans quite yet, but a friend of mine and I are cooking up something nice. I'll share more details when it's appropriate.

As for Turtle, I don't know if I'd go so far to say it's a must, since you can certainly get away without it. But it's as close to a must as anything could be, since once you start baking with it, you'll never want to use any other renderer.

Regarding other miscellaneous plugins, you'll find there are tons of them available all over the Web, for just about any purpose you could think of. I try to use plugins as sparingly as I can, though. There's always a risk involved with getting too dependent on any third party add-on. There's nothing worse than incorporating some nifty modeling tool into your everyday workflow for a year or so, leaving you out of practice with the built-in tools you would have used in its stead, and then when the next update to Maya comes out, you discover the thing doesn't work anymore, and then you don't remember how to use the standard tools effectively. The safest bet is to invest your efforts on getting as comfortable as you can with the built-in tools, before you even think about adding anything else in.

Also, for what it's worth, Maya historically has had a really good track record of swallowing up the best third party plugins into itself with each update. For example, there used to be a few really great must-have plugin tool kits for poly modeling, chock full of edge looping tools, UV'ing tools, etc. But they're pretty much all unnecessary today, since Maya now comes with the same kinds of tools built in, and they're just as good or better than the plugin ones ever were. The developers consistently seem to do a good job keeping an eye on what users most want and need, and delivering well in response.

That's one of the reasons Maya can do as many things as it does. The whole platform is pretty much an amalgam of what used to be lots and lots of separate programs and tool kits. I guess you could say Maya's sort of the Borg of 3D in that respect. If you're a smaller program in the same space, and you're useful enough and interesting enough to get noticed, sooner or later Maya will add your distinctiveness to its own.

That sounds VERY interesting! Can't wait to see exactly what it is you have cooking