Totally Wakky Maya sculpties

After a week of struggling to import a sculptie with a reasonable facimile of that i made in maya, I have to finally admit i am whipped and need help. The nicely sculpted forms i make in maya are twisted distorted and completely unuseable in sl.

To inform of what i have attempted to do" First, i am using Qarl Lindens sculpt.mel Script for running in maya. At first i used his advanced script, and the example ant which i loaded. Worked perfectly to export the forms for the ant altho i couldnt use the importer scripts to form the ant in sl cos i saw no place to request maya to make a primscript when it exported the textures which is apparently needed to make the auto forming of the required mutli prims needed to form the ant. . But i saw that i could take and make a very accurate sculpie using the individual exported textures.

It seemed like when i tried to make and export my own forms though i kept getting errors, so i thought ok there has to be a script for just exporting one form at a time. I found the other script apparently qarl made earlier and yes it exports now without error on the command line except when i attempt to output a polygon mesh it says it cannot orient it properly. but it outputs the form. However in sl these forms- poly or nurb arent even close to what i make. The forms are extremely blurry and mired like they got melted and mangled terribly.

As a test control, i reloaded the ant and selected the head and exported it from maya scene using the same script and its even better than the copy i made using the multi script. The thing i notice in the ant is that the entire ant as loaded is oriented vertically with head down like at the floor. I also saw the forms i was outputting previously were monumental compared to the ant. To make a sphere close to the size of the ants head it was like .7 which is like a microdot compared to what i was doing., The forms i was using previously were from 6x 6 to 10x10.
I tried making and exporting my own forms with these smaller meshes still no go. the last one looked like someone worked over a ball of butter with a sledgehammer. It sure is hugely frustrating to spend hours making something that looks like a turd when imported into sl.

So anyway what this tells me that there must be something im doing in maya which is not correct when i make the sculpie tex - i saw the ant head - a nurb form- had 40x 30 mesh. with a curve precision of 13 == pretty fine It also had extra mesh in the area where it was more detailed. As i said these hightly detailed forms come into sl perfeclty when i export them

sooooo does anyone have some helpful info as what i need to do so i can export my own forms accurately? Are there settings someplace i need to set in maya or is the orientation of the basic form have to be a certain way like upside down etc? Frankly i really hate asking for help but at this point i think further efforts are absolutely futile. It seems like i could spend many months trying to unravel the complexity of this. As you all know the learning curve for maya and being able to use that to make forms is allready monumental and having this total roadblock trying to import the forms accurately into sl is just more frustration than any reasonable person should have to deal with. Does anyone know if polygons meshes can be accurately imported? i ask this cos i like working with them a hell of a lot more than nurbs since the options to control is much more controlled refined and option rich. Sculpting nurbs however feels as uncontrollable as trying to sculpt a head of a needle with with an f16.

I am sure someone out there has allready surmounted these problems so i am asking for your generous help. Stuff i have made so far doesn even make decent rocks and i sure didnt spend all this money to purchase maya to make crappy rocks.

Thanks in advance

Jona Bakalava.

Man what is it in this life-- you buy banannas and 3 days later they are brown.

Mr Few will be along shortly. Please take a seat, sir.

Hahaha. Thanks for the intro, 2K.

Jonas, without knowing more about what you are and aren't doing, I'm guessing your problem is either that you're not using spherical topology, or that you haven't been removing transformations and history before you export. Try this:

1. Make a NURBS sphere with 16 sections and 15 spans.

2. Move the vertices around to turn the shape into something other than a sphere. Be sure not to tear the surface. Keep both poles intact. You can make any shape you want, but the topology must remain spherical.

3. With the object selected, perform the following actions (in order):

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

With these actions we've told Maya that the state the object exists in now is the state it's always been in. As far as Maya knows, it just appeared out of thin air the way it is at this moment. It has no transformations, edits, or any other history. Its rotation is zero. Its origin is the origin of the universe. This "belief" on Maya's part is necessary in order for the sculpt export map to work properly. Otherwise, the sculpty will come out all kinds of distorted and messed up. I'm guessing this is what you were missing before.

4. Output your sculpt map, upload it, and test the object in SL.

If the above worked, then you should be able to use the same process to fix all your other stuff.



As far as your question about using polygons, the answer is yes, you can use them. However, you need to ensure your polygonal surface has a perfect UV space. By default, Maya does not map spheres the same way SL does. If you want to dive into learning UV mapping, go for it. Otherwise, just use NURBS. NURBS always translate to perfect UV's. They can't exist any other way.

Also, using NURBS tends to make your sculpties a bit more "LOD proof". The way SL handles level of detail for sculpties is by removing vertices at regular intervals as your camera gets further from the object. Unless you take steps to "reinforce" key points on your objects by overlapping vertices, you'll have those points disappear over distance. You'll have to be really close up to see full detail.

Because NURBS require you to overlap control vertices anyway for detail purposes, you end up with more robust sculpties. You have a bit less open ended options, obviously, since the overlapping limits the number of usable "faces", but at least you can be confident that the shape will hold up well against LOD culling.

Of course, you can do the same overlapping with polygonal modeling too, but since you don't have to, it's tempting to try to squeeze more detail into each sculpty than really should be there.

For best results, NURBS spheres with 16 sections and 15 spans are the way to go. If you're not good at NURBS modeling right now, just keep at it. It's a lot easier than you probably think it is right now. It just takes practice.


By the way, if you haven't been through all the getting started tutorials in the Help, you really should do that. As I often say, unlike with other programs, Maya's help is actually helpful. There really is no better way to learn than to run through all the tutorials. If you haven't been through them all yet, put your sculpty efforts on hold for a bit, and come back to it after you have. Trust me; you'll be glad you did.

Go through them all, from start to finish, in order. Don't skip around. When you're done, you'll have a solid mastery of the basics of Maya. After that, your sculpty modeling will be ten times easier.

Thanks Chosen, i didnt expect a reply so fast. Funny while i was waiting i read a post you had given another person about removing history. When i looked at the ant it had no history at all. So i fooled around made a bird head in nurbs, removed the history and dl it-- dang it isnt perfect yet but wow it kind lof looks like what i made-- Of course i will follow your additional instructions. I want to thank you for your generous post.

I have been going through the maya tutes and they are very helpful. This reminds me of studying a lot of command instructions for programming and it seems its mostly by doing it a lot is where u really leard cos you run into problems to solve and finding answers is how you really learn.

One thing you have to love about sl is the many kind and genuinely nice people on here. Looks at my brown banannas-- want one?

Thanks a "bunch"

Jonas "~~~~@

NP, Jonas. I have to second your comment about all the nice people in SL. That, more than anything else, is what got me hooked on SL when I first started. It's hands down the friendliest place on the Iternet. The culture has certainly changed a bit over the last 4 years since the days when everybody knew everybody, but the core has remained the same, which is great.

Oh, and by the way, brown bananas make for the best banana bread.

Total noob Maya man here so quite likely me lol

But I can bring in the ant sections np, look wonderful! But when i use a Nurb Sphere 16 x15, I get this almost uncanny symmetrical hole/tear right down the edge of the prim when uploaded. I tried the freeze and reset but still no luck.

I must be tearing it with out knowing? I will take your advice Mr Few and get on to those help tutorials lol

Its true, there is still a lot of nice people left in SL for sure it s a great place to be

It's often possible to fix sculptie textures with 'wrong edges' outside of Maya too.

Load the sculptmap in photoshop (or any other gfx program) and rotate it 90 degrees counter clockwise. Save and reupload.