Looks like the new poly cap is 130k! The only thing I can think of that would come close would be a really high fidelity character for next gen. You can also export as a .obj now, but the plugin needs to be activated the first time.
In regards to exporting in pieces, separate objects are separate objects, so there's no reason you couldn't stitch them together in another package.
Luckily I qualify as a student so I can play around in Maya LT for free ^^
I think it's really good that you listen to your customers and learn from your mistakes.
Maya LT 2015 really is improved a lot, and if I had $~765, I'd grab a copy of it.
-gie005
So what's the catch with Maya 2015 LT for an indie game developer ?
Currently I am using Blender for all of my needs, but I am getting weary of all these little issues associated with Blender.
I am not familiar with Maya at all, but for all I know iD Software used it for Doom 3 (and I am using same game engine) and the plugin that came with the game was reading Maya's .mb files. Does Maya 2015 LT save scenes in the same kind of format?
I also wonder how well iPi Soft would work with Maya 2015 LT (unless there is no clear relation between that app and any 3D package).
I am not familiar with Maya at all, but for all I know iD Software used it for Doom 3 (and I am using same game engine) and the plugin that came with the game was reading Maya's .mb files. Does Maya 2015 LT save scenes in the same kind of format?
Maya LT will read a Maya 2014 .MB file. I've tested this. The native format is .MLT - I'm not sure how different this is to a .MB file. You can always just use FBX to transfer files.
So what's the catch with Maya 2015 LT for an indie game developer ?
Currently I am using Blender for all of my needs, but I am getting weary of all these little issues associated with Blender.
I am not familiar with Maya at all, but for all I know iD Software used it for Doom 3 (and I am using same game engine) and the plugin that came with the game was reading Maya's .mb files. Does Maya 2015 LT save scenes in the same kind of format?
I also wonder how well iPi Soft would work with Maya 2015 LT (unless there is no clear relation between that app and any 3D package).
I think the advantage that Maya LT offers over Blender at the moment is that you don't have to deal with the little issues. The smoothing group problems, import export difficulties etc aren't as big of a problem in Maya LT because the game engines test their pipelines against Maya/Max.
Plus you get ShaderFX support and Substance support (which is a big deal for me). The disadvantage of Maya LT (and Maya in general) for me (as someone who does environmental art) is that its modeling toolkit is lacking. I can model stuff way faster in Blender than Maya will ever let me go (even with scripts). So my pipeline at the moment looks like modeling and sculpting in Blender -> baking in X-Normal -> texturing in Substance and Maya LT -> export from Maya LT. As I use UE4 this cuts out a lot of the export problems that arise from using Blender's current FBX exporter.
Dashiva, Autodesk makes a free standalone .obj > .fbx converter. I haven't compared it against LT but it might be worth a look.
I use LT mostly because it's reliable, marketable, and development usually moves faster on for profit software. LT is also the only modeler being developed specifically for game art, which means it's the most likely to mature in a relevant direction for us whereas a lot of Blender's upcoming improvements will be geared more toward film.
So ive been playing with the LT 2015 trial today and have the following initial observations:
- is goz possible in maya LT ... if not are you working on implementing it soon? This question has been asked several times now... it really is quite an important ability for certain workflows. can you work with pixologic to get it up and running?
- hardware render support would be kinda handy at times. might be considered rare use esp with marmoset 2 but it could be nice if we want to take screenshots of our characters in viewport 2 using fancy shader fx shaders.. i.e. the dota shader to render marketing screenshots for dota 2 workshop.
- if the pricing options on steam aren't to my favor, say i want a yearly sub for instance, can i get the dota 2 export tool though the estore if desired. i saw u mention u included the dota shader ( is the export there now too ??)
- how likely are we to get updates on the LT version? Will we see something like Subscription Advantage Pack like mid product cycle "features" along side regular bug fixes/service packs? For me if i am constantly paying for something i kinda feel like it should be supported more frequently than large lump sum yearly releases... i.e. the unreal 4 situation.. monthly sub with dramatic content/fix's every month or so. I really like your feedback site maya annoyances etc. Please don't wait till 2016 to add some of the popular points there. its simply to long to wait.
Finally, just want to say thanks for making 2015 such a good release! some really nice updates for modellers after all these years!
Oh
Feature request:
can you make the new multi cut tool work across symmetry, you guys did amazing job or making most other poly editing tools work across symmetry but not this one
- python scripting. - alot of community made tools need this ...
- auto UV packing similar to quality of headus
Oh:
Issue:
- is the usersetup.mel under the scripts directory ignored in LT?? i have a few things set there to run on startup (mel scripts) and they dont appear to work on LT. Working fine on maya 2015 full though..... is there another way to get scripts to load on maya startup?
cheers smccleland! Can't wait actually for the steam release! and i love that autodesk is active on here listening to devs!
- yeh goz is a mel script im pretty sure but AFAIK it relies on the .ma file format to exchange the data between the packages. soooo yeh you guys would have to work something out there with MLT and pixologic i guess?
- for me in the past ive used hardware render to take larger resolution single frame renders of the viewport for dota marketing material... to be honest ive been using marmoset 2 more recently but i love the camera/film gate tools of maya. keen to check out the dota 2 shader you guys have for comparison. So marmoset 2 does have a nice simple feature that allows you to quickly capture the viewport at double rez + antialising etc i think and saves it locally. even a simple viewport capture like this could be handy.
- ill check the env path tonight but it works fine in 2014 and 2015 so far without any env path needing to be changed. just LT that has the issue.
About GoZ support in Maya LT, I take a look at GoZBrushFromMaya.mel. It relies on the "system" and "fopen" command to work properly. The "system" command is not supported in Maya LT. And The "fopen" command doesn't work on "a" or "w" mode. These two limitations kinda block GoZ from working in Maya LT.
If the intention is to prevent the polygons larger than 65K from exporting to the files by using MEL script, I suggest limit the file size that to be appended or written (for example, don't allow file size to be larger than 1MB) instead of the blocking the "a" or "w" mode of "fopen" command completely.
Is the monthly plan the ONLY option through steam? Any chance we could get the yearly plan? or better, a perpetual license plus subscription? Or even just buy the yearly sub alone, unless we NEED the perpetual license to qualify for the sub, i'm not entirely sure how it works.
I'm personally not too fond of the monthly plan idea, not at 50$ (about 30£) a month, especially with VAT on top of that, I'd rather pay for the perpetual license then the yearly sub, which would be cheaper in the long run than the monthly rental plan, especially since, at the moment, i currently don't have a steady source of income (I want to try and finally make some cash from this hobby), and i won't be able to keep up the rental indefinitely, and as i understand it, once the rental payments stop, access is revoked, and i would hate to suddenly loose access, especially if i'm in the middle of a project.
yeh personally the only thing stopping me from purchasing atm is not being able to get all the dota tools + a yearly sub. (estore or steam whichever) Im curious to see if u could rip the scripts from the steam version and put it on a estore version buut i dont really want to shell out $50 just to try this. + another $400 for the sub. or if autodesk could send me the scripts after I sign up for the yearly sub?
also would be nice in the future that if you did happen to purchase via the estore that you could potentially tie it to your steam account so you could get updates etc as they release... not sure how LT handles updates actually, if you have to do the full uninstall+reinstal Service pack like 2014. or it would just patch it like steam games.
being able to open *.mlt in maya would be nice as well.
i use HKLocalTools alot in 2014, ive yet to test it in LT dongyfeng but maya 2015 i believe implemented a lot of the functionality of this script naitivly. I am yet to thoroughly test it but some quick little tests were pretty promising.
if this is in fact a bug with LT it would add to my perhaps my biggest complaint/annoyance (though not a show stopper) of LT so far in that scripts/tools that work normally in regular maya either are broken/unsupported, or require special LT versions made. feels like it unnecessary complicates things. it's an initial sourness but i should be able to work around it.
Python - yeah there's definitely a lot of stuff out there using Python it's just hard juggling what features Maya LT has vs Maya. Something to keep voicing though if the community feels it's necessary for LT to succeed.
As a rigger, no python is a big reason not to use Maya LT.
Been playing with LT a bit more and have discovered another missing ability this one is pretty core to my workflow, I can't use headus's script to send meshes to headus and back ... again works perfectly fine in 2014/2015 maya full. this is actually a pretty significant loss in productivity not being able to quickly pass infomration back and forth between maya lt and headus.
C:/Users/Chris/Documents/maya/2015LT/prefs/scripts/uvlayout_open.mel line 522: The "system" command is not supported by Maya LT.
So, in my tests of the dota 2 exporter, mainly couriers, wards and ablitiy, I've run into some issues.
-It seems there is an inablity to select multiple meshes for exporting using the dota 2 exporter, and simply merging them into a group doesn't seem to fix this issue. This is preventing me from doing any test with the couriers Ive previously created given they're all broken into idividual meshes.
-The lack of an .smd importer/exporter or the ablity to load those file types into the DOTA2 Exporter. Personally this is a huge one for me. If you put offical .smd support in maya, it would be a gamechanger. *Update, it appears that MESA does work with MayaLT, so I do have the ablity to import/export .smds now. However my arguement about loading .smds into the DOTA2 Exporter still stands.
-As expected, the ablity section of the dota2 exporter is completly broken. While I was successful in exporting a recent pugna ward, simply importing into dota didn't happen, it just failed to trasnfer over unlike my previous tests with the wards. As an example, Witch Doctor's Death Ward has animations which arent even included in the ingame importer, a few of these are like this.
Outside of the exporter, a few personal issues I have is the lack of animation layers. This is a huge turn off for me. And, I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the inablity to save out as an .ma.
Other then the issues listed above it's a great tool for doing workshop related stuff, hopefully when these issues get fixed I'll reconsider my monthly sub, for right now, it was a fun $50 experiement.
Been playing with LT a bit more and have discovered another missing ability this one is pretty core to my workflow, I can't use headus's script to send meshes to headus and back ... again works perfectly fine in 2014/2015 maya full. this is actually a pretty significant loss in productivity not being able to quickly pass infomration back and forth between maya lt and headus.
C:/Users/Chris/Documents/maya/2015LT/prefs/scripts/uvlayout_open.mel line 522: The "system" command is not supported by Maya LT.
Last time I brought this exact same question on autodesk's forum, I got an answer that Maya LT 2015 would have a better UV tool.
Another Blender user here. I've also been evaluating Maya LT to take advantage of the animation and export tools. On the modelling side, Blender has a few features that make it much faster:
- You can snap to vertex when scaling. You can also change the snapping origin without having to change the pivot point.
- You can easily hide faces, verts, etc by pressing h. Unhide it alt + h.
- The mirror modifier seems to work better in Blender. The maya alternative (duplicate special) requires a negative scale on the x axis which can result in flipped normals on the instanced part.
- For rotation, scale, translation you press a hotkey (r,s,t respectively), select an axis, and can then input a value for the amount you want to move. This sequence is a massive time saver since I don't have to click on any translation handles or manually input values into a field.
If I'm wrong about any of this, please let me know. I'm still new to the Maya workflow.
Maya has a mirror geometry feature other than duplicate special, but duplicate special should no longer flip normals; I think it was fixed in Maya 2014 or 2013.
Maya's modeling efficiency comes largely from it's patented marking menus. But strangely it seems most paid tutorials rarely use the marking menus. I don't know why they use the very slow and tedious top menus instead. So from watching tutorials you may not get a good idea of Maya's modeling speed.
Blender definitely has modeling features I wish Maya had such as grid fill.
I made a request in Maya Feedback Ideas for "Quad Fill Hole like Blenders Grid Fill"
Turtle essentially has cage baking, there's just no visual representation for the cage so you need to be really conscientious of your meshes' scale.
In the Turtle Baking Settings dialogue, go to Baking > Targets > Transfer Settings.
There, change the Sampling Preset to "Inwards", this means that Turtle will cast rays inward from its projection, which is what a cage does.
You'll then want to change Back Bias to something like -1, which means Turtle's "cage" will be a 1 unit inflation of the mesh you're baking to. This number should be large enough to envelop your high poly mesh. (Just like a cage would.) If you've used regular Maya, this is exactly like changing your envelope size in Transfer Maps, only the numbers are negative instead of positive.
Lastly, change Back Range to something greater than your Back Bias so that you know the projection rays will hit the high poly mesh, otherwise they'll just return artifacts in your bake.
Front Range and Front Bias should just be 0, we shouldn't need them.
From there it's just a matter of tweaking your Back Bias and Back Ranges so that your high poly mesh is hit correctly. Again, just be really aware of what 1 Maya unit actually is in relation to your meshes. As long as your low poly mesh is set up to receive bakes well, everything should go smoothly. Luckily Turtle's really fast, so you can check and tweak your results pretty quickly.
Does anyone know if there are any issues with using Maya LT from a full workflow perspective and using an older version of Unity? At my work we are still stuck on Unity 3.5 (sad I know)... not sure when plans to upgrade are however, I've been exploring Maya LT 2015 for the studio (evaluating it) and not sure if there are going to be any road blocks from getting assets, animation, etc into Unity 3.5. I saw the Send to Unity feature and it seemed really great and seamless. Can anyone speak to this because I'd love to be able to provide some data for my boss!
Any word on an extension ? Really hoping to see some relaxation on the whole system command so I can use basic Maya plugins with this. Headus export mainly. The new pricing especially annually is quite nice.
To Bellsey and the rest of the Autodesk team, you have been doing a terrific job of responding to user feedback on Maya LT. It has come a long way in the past year. I agree with Boonta, the price changes are especially helpful.
The main features I am waiting for are:
A "Send to Cryengine" feature with unlimited polys (similar to Send to Unity)
Relaxed restrictions on autorigging
Relaxed restrictions on animation features
GoZ support
Support for a broader set of AutoDesk-approved plug-ins
I haven't kept up much on CryEngine but has the latest version added FBX support at all? I know it always had a proprietary file format they used but not sure if that's changed since I last looked at it.
Something that really annoys me about Maya LT is it's viewport navigation. In particular the "Tumble" tool. Coming from other apps I am used to have whatever vertice/edge/poly currently selected being the "center" for the tumble. Not so in Maya, I first have to press "F" every time to make that selection my new center. I find that highly annoying and time consuming when you're modeling. Seems very "old school" the current Tumble options.
What sort of stuff would you like to relaxed for auto rigging? Are you referring to supporting 3rd party rigging systems out there or just more rigging workflows inside of LT?
What animation features are most critical to you that are missing i.e. you can't animate without it?
I haven't kept up much on CryEngine but has the latest version added FBX support at all? I know it always had a proprietary file format they used but not sure if that's changed since I last looked at it.
The big question would be: why do you need Python? External plug-ins you rely on? Certain scripts people have written that you use?
Epic Games released with the UE4 Subscription their auto-rigging tool for example. Very powerful but in python. I'm sure some indie dev using the engine would like to see this tool under Maya LT.
Most of my scripts work in mel, but I have also one that rely on python (for performance reasons).
Yeah I hear this one quite frequently from users coming to Maya from other packages. I'll pass this along to the dev team since I know they've been working hard around the modelling and general workflow improvements.
Tumble works as it should now, I hope they won't change anything.
wow, the price change is just fantastic, question though: does maya LT still require it's own file extension, or can it save/read .ma now? honestly as petty as that sounds, it's what held me back from jumping on the LT train earlier.
thanks again smcclelland for being so active here and listening/responding to our questions and feedback!
Tumble works as it should now, I hope they won't change anything.
It can be annoying and inefficient having to manually change the tumble pivot, by pressing f key, after changing selections, especially since f key also dollies in on selection which if you don't want then requires you to dolly back out.
Maybe it should be a preference setting.
And thanks smcclelland, for passing it on to the devs.
Hmm, interesting point about the price drop, 25£ is more reasonable than 45£, but until GoZ support is added, and maybe Xgen (for geometry instancing over a mesh), then i won't be switching to LT (I have an ancient version of max on a non-commercial license, and i really don't want to go back to using that), and right now, the full package of Maya is just out of the question.
Oh, and you might want to consider adopting a similar policy to Epic regarding the subscription, such as allowing users to retain access to the software if the payments stop, just disallow access to updates/upgrades, because those desktop subscriptions cannot be maintained indeffinitely.
GOZ is the quickness of it, and because it is able to send vertex colour information to and from zbrush. Which standard objs cant do.
If you look into it, zbrush has its own style of obj files which store colour information.
Make a mesh in zbrush polypaint it, and export to obj. Than open that in a text editor and you will see what i mean.
It shouldn't be hard to edit the existing obj exporter to append this additional data, or perhaps make a post export script that appends this data after the vertex list of the obj file.
The polyPaint data for zbrush is stored after the vertex list of the obj file, as comments starting with "#MRGB" with 4 hex values per vertex for the M R G and B channels.
It stores the data for 64 vertices per line before you have to start a new line with the "#MRGB" prefix.
Your best to just look at a obj from zbrush that contains the data to see what i mean.
Replies
In regards to exporting in pieces, separate objects are separate objects, so there's no reason you couldn't stitch them together in another package.
But $50 a month subscription is too much.
I think it's really good that you listen to your customers and learn from your mistakes.
Maya LT 2015 really is improved a lot, and if I had $~765, I'd grab a copy of it.
-gie005
Currently I am using Blender for all of my needs, but I am getting weary of all these little issues associated with Blender.
I am not familiar with Maya at all, but for all I know iD Software used it for Doom 3 (and I am using same game engine) and the plugin that came with the game was reading Maya's .mb files. Does Maya 2015 LT save scenes in the same kind of format?
I also wonder how well iPi Soft would work with Maya 2015 LT (unless there is no clear relation between that app and any 3D package).
Maya LT will read a Maya 2014 .MB file. I've tested this. The native format is .MLT - I'm not sure how different this is to a .MB file. You can always just use FBX to transfer files.
I think the advantage that Maya LT offers over Blender at the moment is that you don't have to deal with the little issues. The smoothing group problems, import export difficulties etc aren't as big of a problem in Maya LT because the game engines test their pipelines against Maya/Max.
Plus you get ShaderFX support and Substance support (which is a big deal for me). The disadvantage of Maya LT (and Maya in general) for me (as someone who does environmental art) is that its modeling toolkit is lacking. I can model stuff way faster in Blender than Maya will ever let me go (even with scripts). So my pipeline at the moment looks like modeling and sculpting in Blender -> baking in X-Normal -> texturing in Substance and Maya LT -> export from Maya LT. As I use UE4 this cuts out a lot of the export problems that arise from using Blender's current FBX exporter.
I use LT mostly because it's reliable, marketable, and development usually moves faster on for profit software. LT is also the only modeler being developed specifically for game art, which means it's the most likely to mature in a relevant direction for us whereas a lot of Blender's upcoming improvements will be geared more toward film.
So ive been playing with the LT 2015 trial today and have the following initial observations:
- is goz possible in maya LT ... if not are you working on implementing it soon? This question has been asked several times now... it really is quite an important ability for certain workflows. can you work with pixologic to get it up and running?
- hardware render support would be kinda handy at times. might be considered rare use esp with marmoset 2 but it could be nice if we want to take screenshots of our characters in viewport 2 using fancy shader fx shaders.. i.e. the dota shader to render marketing screenshots for dota 2 workshop.
- if the pricing options on steam aren't to my favor, say i want a yearly sub for instance, can i get the dota 2 export tool though the estore if desired. i saw u mention u included the dota shader ( is the export there now too ??)
- how likely are we to get updates on the LT version? Will we see something like Subscription Advantage Pack like mid product cycle "features" along side regular bug fixes/service packs? For me if i am constantly paying for something i kinda feel like it should be supported more frequently than large lump sum yearly releases... i.e. the unreal 4 situation.. monthly sub with dramatic content/fix's every month or so. I really like your feedback site maya annoyances etc. Please don't wait till 2016 to add some of the popular points there. its simply to long to wait.
Finally, just want to say thanks for making 2015 such a good release! some really nice updates for modellers after all these years!
Oh
Feature request:
can you make the new multi cut tool work across symmetry, you guys did amazing job or making most other poly editing tools work across symmetry but not this one
- python scripting. - alot of community made tools need this ...
- auto UV packing similar to quality of headus
Oh:
Issue:
- is the usersetup.mel under the scripts directory ignored in LT?? i have a few things set there to run on startup (mel scripts) and they dont appear to work on LT. Working fine on maya 2015 full though..... is there another way to get scripts to load on maya startup?
- yeh goz is a mel script im pretty sure but AFAIK it relies on the .ma file format to exchange the data between the packages. soooo yeh you guys would have to work something out there with MLT and pixologic i guess?
- for me in the past ive used hardware render to take larger resolution single frame renders of the viewport for dota marketing material... to be honest ive been using marmoset 2 more recently but i love the camera/film gate tools of maya. keen to check out the dota 2 shader you guys have for comparison. So marmoset 2 does have a nice simple feature that allows you to quickly capture the viewport at double rez + antialising etc i think and saves it locally. even a simple viewport capture like this could be handy.
- ill check the env path tonight but it works fine in 2014 and 2015 so far without any env path needing to be changed. just LT that has the issue.
Thanks again!
If the intention is to prevent the polygons larger than 65K from exporting to the files by using MEL script, I suggest limit the file size that to be appended or written (for example, don't allow file size to be larger than 1MB) instead of the blocking the "a" or "w" mode of "fopen" command completely.
I'm personally not too fond of the monthly plan idea, not at 50$ (about 30£) a month, especially with VAT on top of that, I'd rather pay for the perpetual license then the yearly sub, which would be cheaper in the long run than the monthly rental plan, especially since, at the moment, i currently don't have a steady source of income (I want to try and finally make some cash from this hobby), and i won't be able to keep up the rental indefinitely, and as i understand it, once the rental payments stop, access is revoked, and i would hate to suddenly loose access, especially if i'm in the middle of a project.
also would be nice in the future that if you did happen to purchase via the estore that you could potentially tie it to your steam account so you could get updates etc as they release... not sure how LT handles updates actually, if you have to do the full uninstall+reinstal Service pack like 2014. or it would just patch it like steam games.
being able to open *.mlt in maya would be nice as well.
Repro steps:
1. Download the script and unzip the script to script directory.
2. In script editor, type commands to bring up the UI:
source "HKLocalTools.mel";
HKLTOptionBox;
3. Follow the steps in the youtube links bellow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P737kEPAk-Y&feature=youtu.be
Result:
Selected polygons does not rotate.
if this is in fact a bug with LT it would add to my perhaps my biggest complaint/annoyance (though not a show stopper) of LT so far in that scripts/tools that work normally in regular maya either are broken/unsupported, or require special LT versions made. feels like it unnecessary complicates things. it's an initial sourness but i should be able to work around it.
As a rigger, no python is a big reason not to use Maya LT.
C:/Users/Chris/Documents/maya/2015LT/prefs/scripts/uvlayout_open.mel line 522: The "system" command is not supported by Maya LT.
-It seems there is an inablity to select multiple meshes for exporting using the dota 2 exporter, and simply merging them into a group doesn't seem to fix this issue. This is preventing me from doing any test with the couriers Ive previously created given they're all broken into idividual meshes.
-The lack of an .smd importer/exporter or the ablity to load those file types into the DOTA2 Exporter. Personally this is a huge one for me. If you put offical .smd support in maya, it would be a gamechanger. *Update, it appears that MESA does work with MayaLT, so I do have the ablity to import/export .smds now. However my arguement about loading .smds into the DOTA2 Exporter still stands.
-As expected, the ablity section of the dota2 exporter is completly broken. While I was successful in exporting a recent pugna ward, simply importing into dota didn't happen, it just failed to trasnfer over unlike my previous tests with the wards. As an example, Witch Doctor's Death Ward has animations which arent even included in the ingame importer, a few of these are like this.
Outside of the exporter, a few personal issues I have is the lack of animation layers. This is a huge turn off for me. And, I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but the inablity to save out as an .ma.
Other then the issues listed above it's a great tool for doing workshop related stuff, hopefully when these issues get fixed I'll reconsider my monthly sub, for right now, it was a fun $50 experiement.
Last time I brought this exact same question on autodesk's forum, I got an answer that Maya LT 2015 would have a better UV tool.
- You can snap to vertex when scaling. You can also change the snapping origin without having to change the pivot point.
- You can easily hide faces, verts, etc by pressing h. Unhide it alt + h.
- The mirror modifier seems to work better in Blender. The maya alternative (duplicate special) requires a negative scale on the x axis which can result in flipped normals on the instanced part.
- For rotation, scale, translation you press a hotkey (r,s,t respectively), select an axis, and can then input a value for the amount you want to move. This sequence is a massive time saver since I don't have to click on any translation handles or manually input values into a field.
If I'm wrong about any of this, please let me know. I'm still new to the Maya workflow.
Maya has a mirror geometry feature other than duplicate special, but duplicate special should no longer flip normals; I think it was fixed in Maya 2014 or 2013.
Maya's modeling efficiency comes largely from it's patented marking menus. But strangely it seems most paid tutorials rarely use the marking menus. I don't know why they use the very slow and tedious top menus instead. So from watching tutorials you may not get a good idea of Maya's modeling speed.
Blender definitely has modeling features I wish Maya had such as grid fill.
I made a request in Maya Feedback Ideas for "Quad Fill Hole like Blenders Grid Fill"
http://mayafeedback.autodesk.com/forums/160514-ideas-for-maya-forum/suggestions/5491443-quad-fill-hole-like-blenders-grid-fill
In the Turtle Baking Settings dialogue, go to Baking > Targets > Transfer Settings.
There, change the Sampling Preset to "Inwards", this means that Turtle will cast rays inward from its projection, which is what a cage does.
You'll then want to change Back Bias to something like -1, which means Turtle's "cage" will be a 1 unit inflation of the mesh you're baking to. This number should be large enough to envelop your high poly mesh. (Just like a cage would.) If you've used regular Maya, this is exactly like changing your envelope size in Transfer Maps, only the numbers are negative instead of positive.
Lastly, change Back Range to something greater than your Back Bias so that you know the projection rays will hit the high poly mesh, otherwise they'll just return artifacts in your bake.
Front Range and Front Bias should just be 0, we shouldn't need them.
From there it's just a matter of tweaking your Back Bias and Back Ranges so that your high poly mesh is hit correctly. Again, just be really aware of what 1 Maya unit actually is in relation to your meshes. As long as your low poly mesh is set up to receive bakes well, everything should go smoothly. Luckily Turtle's really fast, so you can check and tweak your results pretty quickly.
Thanks,
B.
i wonder why transfer maps was removed!? it was so simple in there....
i bake in xnormal tho so its not that big of a deal.
The main features I am waiting for are:
A "Send to Cryengine" feature with unlimited polys (similar to Send to Unity)
Relaxed restrictions on autorigging
Relaxed restrictions on animation features
GoZ support
Support for a broader set of AutoDesk-approved plug-ins
its still the same, no fbx
Apart from that I think Maya LT is a GREAT deal.
There is FBX support for cryengine.
http://www.crydev.net/newspage.php?news=116914
it's not really very good though - I've been making a scene using Maya LT and cryengine here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=92707
and I'm constantly running into problems with not being able to properly do various things, like make collision, or assign shaders.
Epic Games released with the UE4 Subscription their auto-rigging tool for example. Very powerful but in python. I'm sure some indie dev using the engine would like to see this tool under Maya LT.
Most of my scripts work in mel, but I have also one that rely on python (for performance reasons).
So yeah, Python support would be awesome.
thanks again smcclelland for being so active here and listening/responding to our questions and feedback!
It can be annoying and inefficient having to manually change the tumble pivot, by pressing f key, after changing selections, especially since f key also dollies in on selection which if you don't want then requires you to dolly back out.
Maybe it should be a preference setting.
And thanks smcclelland, for passing it on to the devs.
Oh, and you might want to consider adopting a similar policy to Epic regarding the subscription, such as allowing users to retain access to the software if the payments stop, just disallow access to updates/upgrades, because those desktop subscriptions cannot be maintained indeffinitely.
If you look into it, zbrush has its own style of obj files which store colour information.
Make a mesh in zbrush polypaint it, and export to obj. Than open that in a text editor and you will see what i mean.
It shouldn't be hard to edit the existing obj exporter to append this additional data, or perhaps make a post export script that appends this data after the vertex list of the obj file.
The polyPaint data for zbrush is stored after the vertex list of the obj file, as comments starting with "#MRGB" with 4 hex values per vertex for the M R G and B channels.
It stores the data for 64 vertices per line before you have to start a new line with the "#MRGB" prefix.
Your best to just look at a obj from zbrush that contains the data to see what i mean.