Maya sculpt splitting

[Tia Biscuit]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm trying to make a railing. To do this I need to split a sculpt mesh a lot of times or bend it in a way that it will still look planks. I know this will sacrifice texture quality with that but I'm ok with that. I know this can be done in world with something like studio sculpt. Fox from SS showed me how. But I really would like to do this in Maya so I can sculpt it within a scene and set up lighting for it for shadows on other sculpts etc.

 

So I've tried a few ways to do this, but cannot figure out the basic splits beyond 4 sections on a 128 x 8 mesh.

 

There is a fine line between splits. This was done with 2 rows of 8 verts collapsed into poles then aligned to two rows above to form the split. The sculpt on the right shows how it exports at 8x128 export from Maya in world. You can see the splits bleeding into each other. I then showed a blender user this as I heard blender is better than Maya for sculpts! And gave them the sculpt map from Maya, they then opened it in blender and 2 mins later reuploaded it and presto sculpt on the left the same mesh is perfectly split. They said the poles were not really poles, and needed to re-centre the poles, tighten them again, but they didn't change the geometry setup apart from remaking the poles. The sculpt on the left is what was brought in from blender.

http://i1206.photobucket.com/albums/bb457/Tiabiscuit/6c75b6ac.jpg

 

I have been super careful in Maya, using discrete scale to collapse the verts into one point. I don't know how to make sure this split holds without pumping in more verts to re-enforce the split. But my question in why can Blender hold this kind of split but Maya cant?

 

I then found this guys work, and asked him how the heck he's managed to split a sculpt about 30+ times! He's a 3d Max user and told me it was done with painstaking polygon modelling and UV editing.

http://i1206.photobucket.com/albums/bb457/Tiabiscuit/e8f07ccb.jpg

So I had a go at a polygon mesh at 128x8. I split it first and set the UV's in the editor to normalize. The splits were better, though I needed 3 sets of 8 verts to make the splits hold still, (so still more verts are needed than blender manages) but as you can see I can't manipulate the splits as they don't hold the plank like shape either.

 

http://i1206.photobucket.com/albums/bb457/Tiabiscuit/efa24dbb.jpg

So I'm really lost how to split and make a set of railings like this…

 

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated

Big thank you!

Tia