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mesh tutorials for maya


Shymus Roffo
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Have you already looked on the wiki?  I found a few there, they're not all very detailed, but they should be enough to get you started if you already have experience with Maya.  Considering Maya's price, I'm assuming you're either a student, or otherwise know pretty well how it works already.

The biggest problem for me so far was just getting the necessary skeleton for making avatars. You can get it HERE. (Right click it and Save Link As, the name doesn't matter so long as it ends with ".dae".  You can thank Gaia Clary for providing that link. :matte-motes-tongue:) then import it in Maya.

 

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shymus Roffo wrote:

Are there any Mesh tutorials for maya cause i'm unable to find any tutorials for it.....

Your Maya help file is chock full of them, as is the Internet, and your local book store.  It's just poly modeling, the same thing you'd when making models for any other real-time environment. If you know how to make polygonal models in Maya, then you know how to make them for SL.

A lot of people seem to be under the mistaken impression that "mesh" is some newfangled thing the SL developers invented.  I guess that's to be expected for people who know nothing of 3D beyond SL.  But if you're already a Maya user, then polygonal modeling should already be second nature to you.  It's how everything outside of SL has been done for decades, after all.

If you're just getting started with Maya, then the best advice I can give you is forget all about SL for the next few weeks.  Spend that time getting to know your way around Maya itself.  Maya has the best included help file of any program in the world, so take full advantage of it.  Go through all the tutorials in the Getting Started section (in order, and without skipping over any), and when you're done, you'll have a good, solid working knowledge of the basics.  From there, apply that knowledge to whatever you want to make, be it mesh models for SL or anything else.

 

As for SL's particular implementation of mesh import, there are only few things to know.  These apply whether you're using Maya or any other modeling program:

 

  •  Every uploaded model has a "land impact", which is a calculation of roughly how many prims it would take to equal the same amount of data/overhead.  Needless to say, you want to keep that number as low as possible for each model.  Best strategy for this, just as with all modeling for real-time environments, is to keep your poly counts as low as possible, keep your UV mapping sensible, and be as aggressive as you can with LOD reductions.
  • Just as with prims, sculpties, and textures, each mesh model can have up to four LOD's.  With the former item types, the LOD implementation is not under our control as users.  But with mesh models, we do have control.  You can put as many or as few vertices in each level as you want, as long as the progression goes from highest to lowest.  In other words, the second LOD cannot have more vertices than the first, the third cannot have more than the second, and the fourth cannot have more than the third.  You can either build all the LOD versions yourself (recommended), or you can let the system calculate them for you.
  • In addition to its visual appearance, each model can also contain a physics mesh.  This allows you to control exactly how collisions work for your model.  You can either build the physics mesh yourself (recommended), or you can let the system generate one for you.
  • Each model can have up to eight materials assigned to it.  In SL, that translates to up to eight textures.
  • The format that SL can read for model import is COLLADA (.dae).  From Maya, you can export models to .dae via the stock FBX/DAE plugin, or the free openCOLLADA plugin (available from opencollada.org).  I prefer openCOLLADA myself, but they both work.

Those particulars aside, poly modeling is poly modeling is poly modeling. 

 

Was there anything else you feel you need to know?

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry to say it's NOT just as easy as just poly modelling...  can make a simple human model in maya in one hour... And im trying to import ready mesh for over a week without success. I made a mesh rigged using default SL skeleton. Everytime i try to load it up to SL (Ihavent made LOD's) it doesnt see the highest LOD it sees all lower ones then it crashes... And tbh im not sure how to make LOD's... does that mean i have to make 4 separate meshes each rigged UV'mapped and textured?

 

 

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  • 1 year later...
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