LoganBauer

Reposted hastily from :
SL Forums

This is a rough "beta" method to get Qarl's exporter to allow you to accurately export a polygon shape (just plane so far) from Maya into SL, with a brief layover in photoshop.


YAY! Ok, here's my temporary workaround for the time being. I got to this point by trial and error, so please play around with this method and post any findings here - I'm sure someone else will clean up or find ways to improve this workflow...

1 - Start with a 63x63 Polygon plane in Maya. (I haven't tested with oblong shapes yet, ect. Also 63 is used instead of 64 moreso for the purpose of doubling up our verts evenly in the next step)

2 - Select every other row of vertices, and using "snap to point" drag them over. In other words, every 2 row of vertices should be stacked in the exact same position. Do the same with collumns.

3 - Save this shape for future work(so we don't have to recreate it each time)

4 - Using this basic shape, move verts and create whatever type of sculpt you're going for. You'll need to drag-select to grab our groups of 4 vertices, individually clicking an area will only grab one of the 4 vertices stacked there. *

5 - Export with Qarl's script as a 32x32 sculpt shape (again, not tested with oblong but you'll want to export with the true dimensions of the shape (I.E 32x32, not 64x64)

6 - Open in Photoshop and resize (resample method must be Nearest Neighbor method) to 64x64. Alternately you can resize up to 128x128.

7 - Save and import into SL.



* - Ok, also you can also select your mesh and click (polygons menu) mesh>triangulate. This will turn each polygon square into a tri. However, in the few tests I've run it has resulted in the tri's running the wrong way (opposite of what the resulting SL shape exhibits)

** - this will (slightly to severely) mangle any baked surface texture.

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Leben Schnabel

Here's my current level of knowledge on how to texture these poly objects:

Due to the "stacked" vertices, these "workaround" objects look messed up when you apply a file texture to them (In Maya, that is. The exported sculpty can be textured just fine in SL). Here are two ways to fix this:

1. After your modeling is done: select the object in component mode -> select all vertices -> SHIFT-RMB (Right Mouse Button) -> Merge Vertices -> Merge Vertices.
This collapses all "stacked" vertices into one each and you can texture the object as you want now.

2. Enter the UV editor, go into UV selection mode (RMB -> UV) and do the same with the UV coordinates as you did with the vertices, that is "stack" every second row vertically and horizontally, as can be seen here.

For baking purposes however, it seems to be mandatory to merge the vertices and use the "Average Normals" Tool (maybe you'll need to "Unlock Normals" first) to get the best results.

LoganBauer

There's a better way to do this now, thanks Leben for pointing this out, works on oblongs and doesn't require stacking CV's so it can be properly textured :

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthr...3&page=1&pp=15

siisaar

That is an interesting texture work around, Leben.

I, too, came across the merging of vertices to force hard edges for polygonal shapes in SL by accident after nothing else had succeeded. While it does work, it can also become cumbersome. One thing that has aggravated me is that, without doing this, SL seems to constantly fill in the geometry of sculpts arbitrarily once it gets into SL. This can be ignored for many organic objects, but unacceptable in other situations.

I wonder, can't the MEL script that exports sculpt textures be tweaked somehow so that it uses more accurate RGB values? I've seen programs in SL that allow you to create sculpts of, say, 30 boxes as one sculpt map, with each box having perfectly straight edges. Granted, they use a sculpt texture that is 512x8, so maybe they are just hacking the graphics engine somehow. But if they can do it, I would imagine there should be some way to allow Maya that kind of accuracy instead of having to use multiple programs (like Blender), which slows down work flow.

Imagine being able to loft 1 degree curves to create a surface, and being able to keep those hard edges without having to convert it to a polygon object and merging rows of vertices or exporting and dealing with the caveats of yet another program. Ideally, it wouldn't matter how few points one could use, because the script would still be able to fill in the rest of the geometry without crimping/softening the edges within SL.

I used to think sculpts were great, and they are, but after working with them and dealing with all their caveats, they seem more and more like some half-assed concoction

LoganBauer

Yep. I'd suggest looking at blender anyhow if you haven't already, because while it took me a bit to get familiar with it... it ultimately amounts to about 30 extra seconds at the end of your workflow - just open it up and export it, and it's a lot quicker than the method I posted at the beginning of this thread

And yes, the MEL scripts themselves could be tweaked, probably very easily by someone with a basic understanding of MEL scripting, and that would be even better.