Importing from Maya to SL. How?

Pygora, relax. You were not under attack. I'd encourage to read the text, one sentence after the next, rather than see it as some gigantic wall designed to smother you. That's not what it was about at all.

I never said you don't know what you're talking about. I simply presented facts, some of which happen to be at odds with your description of the way certain things work. Yes, you were mistaken about a few things, but having someone point that out is not an insult, and it certainly doesn't mean that the other parts of what you said had no merrit.

Look, sometimes I'm wrong about technical things too, and when I am, somebody always steps up to correct me. The difference is that when people point out my mistakes, I thank them for the correction. I'm not threatened in any way. My only concern is to make sure the truth gets out. I don't care who it comes from.

Nothing I said was in any way about me being "superior". It was simply a description of how a thing works. Neither the thing itself, nor its functionality, has nothing to do with my worth or yours. It simply is. Why you have need of making such associations, I don't know.

I also never said anything "is just not possible", so kindly don't put words in my mouth. I twice mentioned that the Wings3D exporter works exactly as you described. But since this particular thread happens to be about Maya, it was well worth pointing out that the Maya exporter does not work that way. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't imagine why you think there is.

I hope you'll come to see all this for what it is, and develop a healthier attitude about it than just deciding you've "got better things to do than be condescended to", and leaving. Your input is valuable, as is everyone else's. You weren't being condescended to in any way, shape, or form. But even if you were, so what? Just say what you need to say, get the information out there if you feel it's important, and let the readers decide for themselves what parts of it they find useful.

If someone offers a correction, do one of two things. If they're factually right, thank them for the better information. If they're factually wrong, just take a minute to explain why you were factually right. Either way, there's no need for bruised emotions, or any emotions at all. All we're talking about here are facts, and pretty dry ones at that.

OMG!! you _ARE_ a robot!!!! No wonder you know so much!


AAAAAgagahaaaghaghagahAAAAGH!!

I guess that does sound pretty odd when you isolate it, doesn't it? OK, how about "any emotions at all, in this regard". Does that sound better?

If not, I'll check my skull for wires and access ports. Maybe I'm one of those robots programmed to think he's a real boy.

I dont think I do. I dont know how I could check. xD

Sorry for messing up the thread guys, I didn't mean to come off that strong. Wow. No, I never meant to frame anything as being an expert who rules the subject. I'm just someone who is (IMO) lucky enough to do 3D work every day. I still have much to learn. I'm just a guy who likes talkin about this stuff and got a little over excited. Hope I didn't cause any harm.

Choosen, I'm relaxed, I didn't think that it was an attack on me personally. Honestly I was seeing in my head more as you defending something by using certain behaviors, but I wasn't really sure what. As I said there was a lot of assumptions and points I didn't clarify in my initial post. I also was not trying to say that of the characterizations I indicated I was seeing from you were what you were or are actually doing, just how I was perceiving them. Obviously that's my problem and I took it out on you, sorry about that.

Also, I don't mind corrections. I would thank you, but I'm not sure what I was corrected on as no one ever directly asked me to explain, or verify, anything I was saying (or if they did I completely missed it). I will explicitly indicate that you were correct on the point that given the state of the Maya exporter you will not get accurate 1 to 1 exports. I've tried to own up to my assumptions. I guess I'll have to go back line through that wall-o-text to sort that out. Not good at speed reading that stuff when I'm attempting a fast post. Again, my problem.

This thread has clarified in my mind what kind of social aspect goes with posting on discussions of technical stuff here, hopefully that will lead to a "healthier attitude" in the future. So I will thank you for that.

I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to use poly's for authoring sculpties in Maya you are going to have to jump through more hoops than other 3d applications have to (export mesh as .obj and import to a 3d application with a vert based exporter I guess, research would be required) to get accurate vertex data or just stick with NURBS. Ironic that LL has left Maya users with the least options by supporting it with the official exporter.

Ok, again, sorry folks. The messing up of the thread with the distracting melodramatic stuff from me is finished, I promise - back to your regular scheduled discussion.

No worries, Pygora. Thank you for bringing our misunderstanding to a peaceful conclusion. I do regret anything I may have said that may have been perceived as harsher than intended. As I mentioned to Keira earlier, sometimes my formal writing style has unforeseen emotional consequences. It is something I'm trying to get better at.

In any case, let's get back to discussing the facts. I'd like to talk about a couple of good points you just raised:



I haven't gotten around to trying that yet. I've been told that it's not quite that simple, since Maya apparently does its vertex ordering differently than Wings and other programs. The geometry comes out looking the same to us humans, but to the computer it looks very different. As I said, I've never tested this to confirm. I'll have to do that soon, so I can comment more intelligently on it.

Perhaps you'd like to give it a go, since polygons seem to be your thing? If so, I hope you'll give us a full accounting of what happens.


It is indeed. It's understandable, though, when you think about the history. Sculpties were intended to be precise. I guess the powers that be at LL probably figured prims for precision, sculpties for organics. Hopefully, the issue will be revisited, either by LL, or by a clever resident. If I were good with MEL, it would be the first thing I'd do.






Gebriel, when you launch the scultpy exporter dialog, there are a few checkboxes on it. One of them says Correct Orientation. Make sure it's checked.

If you don't see that checkbox, I'm betting there's probably a scrollbar in the way of it. That was a mistake in the original MEL script. Search in the script for the word "scrollable", and if it has a 1 next to it, change it to a 0.

Thank you sooo much Chosen and everyone else who contributed with long winded posts. Now if I can just learn more about mapping and putting intricate designs on my scultpies then I would be set!

Well, since you asked I'll tell you what I know right now.

As I understand it the issue with Wings is that the plugin programmer hard coded for a specific vert index to generate his map output. Even if you matched the vertex count, chances are staggeringly remote that the vert index order for an imported object from any app will be the same as the one he coded in. You need to load his templates, which have the correct order, to author sculpties in Wings. You can also import sculpty maps, but if you have garbage in, it's gonna be garbage out. Also, if I remember correctly he uses spheres as the basis of his templates, which has been noted gives you the sawtooth. Could be miss-remembering, or this could have been updated.

I would personally say that in the free 3D arena, Blender would probably be the way to go as far as being able to import/create/export with relative freedom. The interface takes some getting used to though. I would classify it the same way as I have heard the Zbrush interface described: made by crack users from the moon. I've used it a grand total of one time for a Maya generated mesh though. I didn't see any issues with it's handling of the mesh or map. I haven't seen any issues with imported meshes from Max that I can remember and Max has a notoriously clunky obj export module.

I know through constant use that 3ds Max can import Maya .obj data and write out properly configured meshes as a sculpty map with no issues that I've ever seen. If you have Maya, you probably don't have or want Max, so I don't know how much help this would be.

Thanks for the info, Pygora.


Interesting. I'm now wondering if the vertex order on those template spheres would survive an import into Maya, and then an export back to Wings before upload. It's something to experiment with some time.


You're probably right that Blender is the better way to go, for many reasons. I'm still curious about Wings, though, since it's a simpler program. Either one is overkill, obviously, if all you're using it for is a sculpt map generator. I know it's silly, but somehow the idea of using Wings for that feels less wasteful to me somehow, since it's not as full featured as Blender.

I do agree with you about Blender's interface, by the way, for what it's worth.


I actually do have Max 8. I've never used it much, so I'm not very fluent with it. Somebody didn't need it anymore, and offered it to me a couple years ago, so I took it. Free is free, right? It's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. I've played with it a few times, but never really used it seriously.

I don't know if the sculptgen plugin will work with version 8 or not. I've never looked into it.

I've tried to wade through all the discussion and have bookmarked for future reference, it's the end of the day and my eyes are tired. Thing is, I'm a total amateur when it comes to all this, I just wanted to thrown my two cents in for something that worked for me AS an amateur.

I've modeled in Maya, doing all the "right" stuff, like using the right surface types and so on. I struggled a little with the MEL exporter. I ended up getting a copy of Simtools which does a brilliant job not just of exporting sculpts, but also of exporting "builds" (it creates a little menu of typical SL prims).

But one thing I've found incredibly useful is to run sculpts done in Maya through Cel Edman's sculpty paint. He now includes a Load Sculpt Image so you can take a sculpt exported from Maya, load it into sculptypaint, and then what I do is a "smooth sculpt" which takes off the rough edges. It also does an OK job giving a normal map as well as a quick lighting bake (which you can then layer on a texture).

By running it through sculpty paint it also does a decent job of getting rid of those nasty wrinkles at the poles. Now, I'm sure I could fiddle more in Maya, but it's such a quick one-button thing and it's built specifically for sculpts.

I have no idea if this is a useful idea to anyone, just my own little comment from the sides, having struggled with this issue for some time and having NO capacity to write scripts or exporters or learn Blender as well!

It's a clunky work-around I'm sure. But the smooth sculpt has saved tons of aggravation.

I do however have a question. Using OpenGL you can get a nice mesh OUT of SL, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to clean up the surfaces in 3DS. If anyone has any 3DS experience and can give me a hand it would be amazing, I just want to understand how it works (basically, to merge adjoining polygons together so that i can render lights and output single large textures instead of 100s of small ones).

Totally offtopic here but Dusan, do you run a blog? Your name sounds soo familiar. If you do could you link me to it?

You gotta tell me more about this simtool importing prims and stuff.

Yes. http://dusanwriter.com

And sure. On the importing/exporting stuff e-mail me if you like or I can keep rambling on here. For now, I'm headed off the grid to bed. Haha. Take care.

Good question! I got some free time here. hold on...

Just tried it. It worked! I exported to obj (with no tessellation) from Wings, edited in Maya and brought it back into Wings, export sculpty map from Wings, imported sculpty map back into Wings. Looked good. The proof in the pudding would be to check it in SL. I'll leave that to others.



Not silly to me. Again, it's a right tool for the job thing. It's focused totally on modeling. When I was in school using Maya, I would use Wings to make and UV map my models as the tools were IMO better. I would use Maya when it came time to rig and animate.

I tell people if they wanna learn polymodeling to start with Wings. There wont be all the distractions of menus for animation, particles, physics simulations and so on that a new user might get lost in.

It does handle meshes in a non-standard way however. You will need to keep your mesh manifold. This can get annoying if you are used to polymodeling by edge extrusion or building up from splines.

Anyone looking to get into Wings should bookmark PuzzledPaul's tutorials. http://www.geocities.com/paulthepuzzles/aardvarks.html Tons of great stuff that I use even now that I don't use Wings for modeling anymore.



SculptGenMax works great in 8 (edit: I just noticed I'm using an older release of SculptGenMax and the newest, RC4, says it needs 9, sorry), that's what I use here at work. So far it's worked for me in 8, 9, 2008, and now 2009. It is solid as it gets. I recommend checking it out very highly.

One thing: If you are used to working in Maya watch out for the spacebar in Max. It will lock your selection and perhaps cause you to curse a bit if you try to select other things.

It sounds like you need the attach/detach and weld vert tools in the Edit Polygon command panel.

Depending how you intercepted the SL mesh information and imported into Max you will either have one big mesh, or random arbitrary chunks of OGL mesh stuff from the dump. If you go into element mode (as it sounds like you did) you will find each triangle is its own element! Yikes right? In Element selection mode you have to go through and detach the faces of whatever you want to be your surface and attach them all to themselves. Then you can weld the verts to make it one true surface.

Remember, there's going to be UV's for the surface of each prim, so you might not want to merge them all together. Sometimes it's better to use an approximate Max object instead too.

Yeah. You pretty much got it right. Part of this is converting existing builds into rendered builds. The idea is if you have existing SL builds to export them (I really found 3D Print Screen far easier to use than OGLE which I then imported into 3DS using a 3DXML converter). Then, once in 3DS, light the scene, and get the textures back out. Problem as you say is that it can come out as a mesh with hundreds of triangles. Although I've detached and attached the faces and welded and so on, it's cumbersome, which is fine.

Neptune Lighting is doing this. Check it out:

http://dusanwriter.com/?p=356

I've rather wondered whether one of the programs like Polygon Cruncher might help.

It's a tiresome process - in the end, seems better to build in 3DS and then in SL, or build in Maya using the Simtools plug-in so you just rez a prim and it follows.

Thanks for the feedback though. I'm so new to it, I had already forgotten how I managed to get it to work last time, so this is really helpful.

D

Thanks for that link. Very impressive! Best I've seen in SL. Walking my avatar into that bar almost ruins the beautifully crafted illusion. And they are doing that with captured video card mesh data? Wow.

Yeah. I usually end up rebuilding in Max if I'm baking anything out. Then again, I have never been at the level of baking shadows from a cocktail glass into a bar.

Max has an offline builder. I've used earlier versions a few times. There were some issues with tapers and twists getting flipped, but overall pretty solid. Looks like there's been some updates to it in the mean time. I never got around to emailing the dev, but those issues could have been addressed in the interim.
http://www.windyweather.net/smf/index.php?topic=109.0

Apparently there's a second one in development by the same guy who made SculptGenMax as well. Pretty exciting, sculpty and prim upload from the same offline build!
http://liferain.com/downloads/primcomposer/