Maya Sculptie

Hey all, I recently got Maya 8.5 and have been dying to make sculpties. I'm very fluent in Photoshop and SL building, but WOW Maya chewed me up and spat me out!! I am not a Maya user at all, so I am brand brand new, I've watched all the video tutorials that come with Maya...8 or so times...

I've been on the forums literally all day searching tutorials for modeling and texture baking. I found one great tutorial but it's very basic and I'm really search for a very step by step tutorial for both modeling and texture baking. If someone could help me I would be very grateful to you. Some of the tutorial links that were posted are now dead. Thanks in advance!

Devon

Still not found any good tutorials either, I'm going to try the tutorial materials for blender instead, I'm not a big fan of Blender's interface but if it has better tutorials then it will win.

I found (like you seem to be) that the gap from introductory tutorials to practical ones is huge, with no good intermediate tutorials to get you up to speed.

Have you already gone through the tutoirals through the Maya interface? Not the learning videos, the tutorial link. I've just started myself, but the projects do take you from start to finish from building to texturing.

As Chocolata said, go through all the Help tutorials, in order. This is my standard answer for all newbie Maya questions. Unlike with most other programs, Maya's help is actually helpful. There is no better resource for getting started with it. This is why you don't see a whole lot of third party tutorials for Maya basics online. There's simply no need for them.

The mistake too many people make when they start with Maya is they try to approach it with a particular task in mind (like sculpties). That never works. What you want to do is take a step back, spend a few days, or even week or two, learning the basics of Maya itself. Then, only after you've developed a good, solid mastery of the foundation, begin to learn about more specific things like sculpties.

Remember, Maya is a platform, just like an operating system is a platform. It can do literally thousands upon thousands of different things. Because Maya can do so much, it often seems overwhelming and intimidating at first. If you keep trying to force-learn it as you have been, it will always seem that way.

So, start over. The Help tutorial projects will get you on your way properly. Resist the temptation to go out of order with them, and don't even think about sculpties until you've finished them. Let each lesson build upon the last like it's supposed to, and you'll be competent with Maya before you know it.

Also, keep in mind that absolutely no one knows how to do everything Maya can do. So don't feel like you have to learn it all. Everyone has to learn the basics the same way, but after that, each individual begins to specialize in what's important for the task at hand. After you've mastered the basics, you'll be able to learn to make sculpties with relative ease. Just don't try before that or you'll have trouble, as you've already discovered.

That is great advice from Chosen and it is what I'm doing though I did find out how to do sculpties in Maya:

start with a Nurbs sphere
16 x 16 isopharms (divisions)
rt click and choose CVs (control vectors) and use the dots to push or pull your object into shape (i'm starting simple with hook shapes) (W pushes or pulls, R scales, E rotates).
use Quarl Linden's UberScript to export as a .tga file(the link is for the script available in the forum somewhere)
upload into SL.

That is the simplest way I know to start if you just want to do shapes. I'm not much at texture baking yet.