Maya Sculpt

Hello

The school I attend has Maya 2008 loaded on a couple of the computer. I asked my teacher if I could take some time after class and learn more about maya. I read here on the forums that people use Maya to create scultpies. Do you create them using Nurbs objects or how exactly are they created from normal meshes?

Since I dont have maya loaded up on my home computer I can't follow tutorials in the comfort of my own home.

Thanks!

First, there's not any such thing as a "normal mesh", so how are you defining the word "normal" in that context? Do you mean the common everyday sense of the word, meaning "not unusual"? Or are you referring to "surface normals", the vectors that run perpendicular to the tangent planes of surfaces?

If you mean not unusual, then you should understand there's nothing at all unusual or "abnormal" about NURBS surfaces, just as there's also nothing abnormal about subdivision surfaces or polygon surfaces. They're simply different types of surface materials, and all are equally "normal". Maya is capable of working extensively with all three types.

If you mean the perpendicular vectors, then you should understand that all surface types have them. For all surfaces, normals are used to calculate everything from how objects are lit to how dynamics and physical collisions happen. There's no such thing as a surface that doesn't have a normal, whether the surface be NURBS, polygon, or subdivision.

Whatever you actually meant, the term "normal mesh" does not make sense.


To answer your question, the simplest way to make sculpties in Maya is to use NURBS surfaces as your source objects. You can use polygons if you want, but if you do, you'll need to take extra steps to ensure that each of your polygonal models always has a perfect UV space. By default, Maya maps spheres differently than SL does. NURBS can never be anything but perfect in that regard (they don't even really have UV's per se), so there's a lot less to worry about with them. In my opinion, this makes NURBS the better choice. I make all my sculpties from NURBS.

Now that you know that much, the next thing to know is this: SLOW DOWN! Do NOT make the mistake of trying to learn Maya with sculpties in mind. If you do, you're you're in for one hell of a struggle. Just about everyone I've ever encountered who has approached Maya with any singular purpose like that in mind has experienced nothing but frustration.

I don't meant to scare you; Maya is incredibly user friendly once you learn its underlying logic. It's just that you need to understand it's a platform, not just a program, and you must approach it as such.

You can not simply sit down with it and force-extract only the particular knowledge you think you'll need for doing any one thing. It just doesn't work that way. You absolutely MUST learn the basics of the platform itself first. Only after you've done that should you attempt to narrow your focus on anything so singularly purposed as sculpties.

Start by going through all the Help tutorials. Unlike with most other programs, Maya's help is actually helpful. It will teach you what you need to know to get started. Resist the temptation to go out of order or to skip over tutorials you don't think you'll need. All the lessons are designed to build upon each other. Go through them all, do the example projects, and you'll quickly develop a solid understanding of how Maya works. Do NOT take this introductory stuff lightly, or you'll have all kinds of problems later on. You must learn all the basics before doing anything else.


I would recommend you download Maya Personal Learning Edition (PLE), so that you can "follow the tutorials in the comfort of your own home". PLE is fully functional in terms of work flow. The only part that is crippled somewhat is output rendering. All renderings from PLE have a watermark over them, indicating they were not made with a licensed copy of the software.

The watermark makes sculpt maps from PLE useless. You can, however, do all your modeling work and everything else short of final output at home in PLE, and then do the output rendering on one of the school machines to avoid the watermark. It's not quite as convenient as doing everything at home, of course, but at least you won't have to hang out in the lab from start to finish every time.

ok, lesee.

Chosen Few - there is such a thing as a normal mesh/map. Most likely Echo is coming from a game modeling perspective, so he will know what people in SL call a sculpt map as a normal map. A normal mesh is an extremely high polygon mesh that will be used to create a normal map, that will be rendered on top of a low polygon mesh to make it look far more detailed than it actually is. Best way to think of it in SL terms is the bumpiness setting under the texture tab, I believe.

I'm beginning to think that working with Sub-D surfaces will have a better outcome than working with NURBS, but currently I am having horrible issues with exporting anything from maya to SL, so until I can figure that out I can't move on to anything else.


Echo Irvine - www.3dbuzz.com. free website, that has tons of video tutorials on just about everything you could ever need/want to learn for SL. Registration required, but downloads are still free. Using the PLE is a great way to get started in Maya. It is extremely complicated, but it is very user friendly. Chosen is correct that you have to have a focused mind when dealing with Maya because it can do so much more than you will ever use it for. You could literally model and object, animate it, and make the surface texture all in Maya before even setting foot in SL. I wouldn't suggest that, but it could be done.

Just take your time, it will all become easier the more you do it.

I suppose you could call the high poly mesh used to create a normal map a "normal mesh" if you really wanted to, but I've never heard it called that. I've just always referred to them as "the high poly version" and "the low poly version" or maybe on occasion "the source model" and "the target model". My point was simply that there are several definitions of the word "normal", and it would be helpful to get some indication from the OP what definition he/she meant.

In any case, sculpt maps are not normal maps. It's very important to understand that. They are actually vertex displacement maps. There's a huge difference there.

Put simply, normal maps dictate which direction light bounces off of a surface, to suggest we're looking at geometric details that are not actually present. Normal maps don't actually alter the shape of the geometry. Vertex displacement maps, on the other hand, DO alter the shape of the geometry, as can plainly be seen when you apply one and the object changes from a sphere to a banana or a football or a staircase or what have you.




I had thought that too before I tried it. If anyone's gotten it to work, hopefully they'll chime in and say how, but my experience is it just doesn't. My theory is the surface sampling process employed by he exporter does not understand the math behind how subdivision surfaces work. The resulting maps do not serve to represent the visual shape of the surface at all.

Even if it were to work, I'm not sure subdivisions would be all that practical for this. It can be pretty difficult to maintain uniform topology with subdivs. It's all too easy to end up with too many vertices at the end. Keeping it within appropriate limits can of course be done. It just requires a good amount of care.

Sculpties were invented with NURBS in mind. There's really no faster or simpler way to work than just to deform NURBS spheres into the shapes you want to make.


What's happening? I'm sure we can help.