I don't think Maya is able to read the vertex color from the obj at all, it's just that via GoZ, zBrush is aware that your are working in an external app, then when you go back you update the geometry, zBrush simply reproject the previous vtx colors (has it do for high details).
GoZ is just a mel script in the end (not very clean by the way as it require the Mental Ray plugin loaded for no reason).
Ya thanks froyok, looked into the goz scripts, zbrush just reprojects the colour onto the mesh when ti returns from maya. The extra data in teh obj is just for zbrushs use and for baking purposes in apps like xNormal.
The big question would be: why do you need Python? External plug-ins you rely on? Certain scripts people have written that you use?
-s
I personally write all my tools and auto rigging scripts in python. So switching to LT would be a lot to work to rewrite everything to mel.
Also I would think the auto rigger from Jeremy Ernst would be used by indie studios who don't have dedicated riggers more than AAA studios. AAA studios seem make their own tools to work with their current pipeline.
The first video especially provides a good overview.
Essentially GoZ communicates both the mesh along with its associated texture, normal, and displacement maps back and forth between Maya and ZBrush. More importantly, it allows the ZBrush version to remain at very high resolution while the Maya version is at a lower resolution while working in both applications back and forth, making changes to the geometry and textures in either application. It automatically and transparently remaps the geometry and texture changes across the different resolutions as it communicates the changes back and forth.
GoZ runs as a MEL script in Maya but the script won't run in Maya LT due to some missing functionality (such as the missing SYSTEM command). The simplest fix would probably be to just add the missing funcitonality to Maya LT. If that is not workable, I would think that it would be fairly easy to find some simple work arounds for the missing functionality once it is investigated.
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.
Currently you can can maintain selection and still easily look around model, which is crucial. In your case it will become annoying unless you select/deselect all components.
Maybe it should be a preference setting.
Probably, but I'm afraid they will break something along the way.
I don't think Maya is able to read the vertex color from the obj at all, it's just that via GoZ, zBrush is aware that your are working in an external app, then when you go back you update the geometry, zBrush simply reproject the previous vtx colors (has it do for high details).
GoZ is just a mel script in the end (not very clean by the way as it require the Mental Ray plugin loaded for no reason).
wait, but why can I get the vertex color in Xnormal while baking directly from zbrush?
Do you mean Maya just doesnt read or the obj doesnt get exported with it at all? Sorry, just trying to understand.
wait, but why can I get the vertex color in Xnormal while baking directly from zbrush?
Do you mean Maya just doesnt read or the obj doesnt get exported with it at all? Sorry, just trying to understand.
OBJ dosnt support color, what is going on is that zbrush saves the extra data as comments appended to the OBJ. XNormal just knows how to read this non standard data zbrush puts in the OBJ.
@Nox I think Thomas and I mostly simply want a preference setting that auto sets tumble pivot to selection each time we make a new selection. That would be super simple where I can't imagine Maya devs could break anything, so I wouldn't worry.
Although I wonder if it would be good to also have another complementary preference setting for updating tumble pivot to selection when that selection is moved by move, scale or rotate tool.
In View > Camera Tools > Tumble Tool > option box, you can check "tumble on object" and it will tumble around whatever object is under the cursor when you Alt + LMB drag. Kind of neat.
Anyways I just wrote a simple script that auto sets tumble pivot to selection. I didn't see a mel command or procedure that solely sets tumble pivot to selection, so it's a little dirty.
How it works:
I created a scriptjob that runs with every selection change. It just runs "Look at Selection", which sets tumble pivot to selection but also rotates camera, so I rotate the camera back, and I prevent it storing that in the undo queue. So with that roundabout way it ends up only setting tumble pivot to every new selection.
For the script to work, you have to go to In View > Camera Tools > Tumble Tool > option box and for "tumble about:" choose "Tumble Pivot". Changing it back to "Center of interest" will disable it.
Create file named PP_AutoSetTumblePivot.mel and put this code inside:
@Nox I think Thomas and I mostly simply want a preference setting that auto sets tumble pivot to selection each time we make a new selection. That would be super simple where I can't imagine Maya devs could break anything, so I wouldn't worry.
A very BIG THANK YOU from me @Perfect_paradigm! That script does EXACTLY what I was after. This script/functionality should really be an option in future versions. Thanks again! You saved the day
Glad you liked it. I just uploaded a few of my scripts to dropbox, and posted them in the Maya scripts thread. You may like them too. I'll probably be uploading many more eventually.
I'm interested in Maya LT although I have some concerns about it. That being said the £80K price tag for Maya alone for all our team members means I'm actively R&Ding at the moment. We have a couple of 3DSmax and Modo licences, but were dropping Modo completely at the end of the month.
Primarily we need a Z-brush friendly work flow, most of what well be doing is rigging NPCS. Luckily enough 90% of our character models fall into the biped category. So we mainly just need something for quickly rigging and animating our models and getting them exported into Unity. We may use if for some level architecture (box modelling) also.
Concerns:
Does a one year pre-paid subscription entitle you to upgrades?
Is anyone using Quixel and MayaLT? (I'd just like some workflow experiences)
Seems there is some good stuff about Go-Z here, Autodesk it would be great if you could get that portion working.
We make open world RPG's, I suppose for the price I might as well just buy a couple of licences for testing purposes. But I'm still a little dubious about hitting limitations, we are focused on current gen games for console and PC.
So far, not impressed by Maya LT. It has the same issues that the standard Maya and Max have when it comes to displaying Shadows with ATi Cards, as in none-at-all or only limited to static materials, and wonky interactions with lights.
Also, random crashing without any kind of log files is a mess to try and figure out, especially when it seems like my hardware isn't supported (how is this even a thing in 2014?!) by Autodesk Certificates.
The restrictions it has when it comes to having a native plugin environment with certain softwares which are not of an Autodesk build is also a really weird decision (I can see what you guys are doing here, tone it down guys).
No offense, but the maybe the time spent trying to force the user sleep with Nvidia and with your own products could be better spent on actually polishing it?
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.
Sorry for the slow response. I was looking at Extension 1 for Maya LT 2015 and noticed that it now includes Set Driven Keys and the ability to use mathemetical expressions to drive animations via utility nodes. These definitely help a great deal.
The remaining animation features that would be helpful are spline IK (for rigging non-biped characters) and perhaps some additional constraints such as geometry constraints (useful for tying mesh morphing to animation changes, such as making biceps bulge as the arm bends at the elbow).
The FBX capability for Cryengine is currently not very usable. Cryengine currently depends on full Maya or 3ds Max plugin support to communicate 3d models so a "Send to Cryengine" capability would be a very big help. Especially, if it provided the same level of functionality as "Send to Unity" such as unlimited polygon support.
Giving the MayaLT 2015 trial a spin just for the sake of it. First thing I am running into is that there seems to be no "Custom" shelf by default, and the shelf editor is not showing up. Is that normal ?
What's strange is that if I perform the keyboard shortcut required to send a menu item to the Custom shelf, I can tell from looking at the listener that things are working just fine behind the scenes - I just don't see the shelf itself. Odd !
(note that I've had a few older and outdated demos versions of Maya installed on this machine here and there, so maybe this is all due to some kind of internal conflict ?)
And of course, long-running Maya issues are still present in LT : when working with move set to symmetry, many operations either don't work on the other side of the mesh, or create unexpected results.
Of course seasoned users work their way around the issue (ie working with an instanced copy of the object to be combined/welded later) but I think it can still be considered as something broken - especially since the symmetry option of the move tool is supposed to be such a time saver.
Yeah it seems a lot still doesn't work in symmetry. I'll be glad when Maya has the basics for modeling done well. Several modeling tools/actions don't work with symmetry such as inserting edge loops and multi-cut.
Instance mirror does not work well as symmetry for several reasons so they need to hurry up with proper symmetry.
With symmetry the extrude manipulator doesn't always display on the side you selected. Sometimes it displays on positive side and sometimes on negative side.
Reproduction:
1. Create cube at origin
2. delete bottom face
3. turn on symmetry x
4. select and extrude bottom right edge in positive x
I agree ! I do not hope to work that way, as I know from years of having to deal with Maya that it is just not possible. But I do have a problem with the feature being only partly implemented, leading to the problems shown above.
I believe no one mentioned lack of proper orthographic user view. While it's possible to enable orthographic in camera option it is completely useless because tubmle tool begins to act wierd.
There is a workaround to leave camera perspective and set narrow angle of view, but modeling toolkit gizmo is getting oversized. So it wouldn't help either.
Somebody else having issues with opening FBX files by double clicking them from desktop? I always get an error message as soon as Maya is done loading.
// Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/MayaLT2015/scripts/startup/doOpenFile.mel line 59: Plug-in, "DirectConnect", was not found on MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH. //
Problem is, there is no "DirectConnect" plugin listed in the Plugin-Manager.
I tried reporting the issue a few times over the past days and their Bug Reporting throws a HTTP Status 500 server error.
Giving the MayaLT 2015 trial a spin just for the sake of it. First thing I am running into is that there seems to be no "Custom" shelf by default, and the shelf editor is not showing up. Is that normal ?
What's strange is that if I perform the keyboard shortcut required to send a menu item to the Custom shelf, I can tell from looking at the listener that things are working just fine behind the scenes - I just don't see the shelf itself. Odd !
(note that I've had a few older and outdated demos versions of Maya installed on this machine here and there, so maybe this is all due to some kind of internal conflict ?)
And of course, long-running Maya issues are still present in LT : when working with move set to symmetry, many operations either don't work on the other side of the mesh, or create unexpected results.
Of course seasoned users work their way around the issue (ie working with an instanced copy of the object to be combined/welded later) but I think it can still be considered as something broken - especially since the symmetry option of the move tool is supposed to be such a time saver.
did you try changing the types of symmetry, for example from object to topology?
Yeah it seems a lot still doesn't work in symmetry. I'll be glad when Maya has the basics for modeling done well. Several modeling tools/actions don't work with symmetry such as inserting edge loops and multi-cut.
Multi-cut works well with topology symmetry (and yes, it wont work with world-space). You can insert edge loops with it (ctrl+multi cut).
For quick symmetrize I can reccomend this script in .mel, it quicker and cleaner than using mirror cut http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/cly_pivotreflectionmodeling-mel
I downloaded the trial, it seems easy to understand. Renderer seems like a decent quality game engine renderer which I'm all for, no mass tweaking / no variances between 3D package and engine.
I actually started building in the first 20 mins, it seems stripped out and simple to use and I kinda love it. I've only played around with it for an hour or two so far.
Our artists use me as a testing platform, because if I can use it anyone can ..
I'll report back in a week after I've gotten used to Nurbs / Subd / Shaders / baking and workflow with Z-brush etc. I'll try some rigging and import a sculpted model and see how far I get. Not bad Autodesk, not bad. (So far) .
I'm still unsure as to why it has any poly limits at all? It seems it would fit right in as a sleek tool for the games market only. We'll see, time will tell..
I recently got Maya LT and I noticed that changing hardware texturing from Bilinear to Unfiltered does not seem to have any effect on the viewport preview.. Not sure why.
Unfiltered texturing works fine in the UV Texture Editor though. Odd.
EDIT: Nevermind what I just said, I just forgot to go into the image file node and set the filtering on that to "Off" as well.
Actually ! I have another question about the various MayaLT pricing options.
It seems obvious to me that the monthly/yearly rentals (either straight from AD or from Steam) grant constant updates and yearly version upgrades, as long as the rent is being paid (if not paid, I suppose that the product gets de-activated and stops running). But what about users paying the whole $795 upfront (which equals to roughly 26 months of rental) ? Do they get free updates forever, Zbrush style ? Or would that require an extra subscription fee too ? I cannot seem to find these explanations on the AD site...
I feel kinda bad thinking about a user renting LT for two years (=$720), who might have to stop renting for financial reasons, only to be left with no access to the program at all ... Similarly, it would be strange for a one-time purchase user to shell out the equivalent of two years of rent, only to effectively receive one year worth of upgrades and fixes.
I am just a bit confused about it all. Is there a page somewhere with everything clearly explained ?
Thanks for the response ! That clarifies it a little.
Sorry if I am being picky but I'd like to make sure I am understanding the following properly, as this is, after all, a rather serious money investment.
If you pay the $795 up front for perpetual then that grants you access to that major version but none of the extension updates[...]
Could you please clarify what an extension update is ? For instance I am currently evaluating Maya LT 2015 and I see that there is a service pack for it which installed automatically when I downloaded/installed the trial last week. Is this an example of an extension update that someone who bought LT 2015 when it just came out would flat out not receive ? I remember big service packs for older versions of Max being released quite a long time after a given version was released (this was, of course, before AD moved to a yearly release schedule). Will this still be the case for MayaLT, or will all bug fixes/support stop for a given version after one year ?
I am asking this because I experienced serious issues with my (rather expensive!) Mudbox licenses and upgrades from 2009 to 2012, and most of these bugs never got resolved even after numerous reports and direct contacts with the support team (I even recorded video reports for them). Some of these bugs where, however, fixed in the Mudbox 2015 release according to what I have seen when trying out the trial ... but unfortunately, I am not allowed access to these bug fixes for my slightly too old version, which is quite frustrating and ends up discouraging me from using the program at all in some scenarios. I am afraid of ending in the same situation with a permanent license of MayaLT 2015 - even tho, admittedly, MayaLT2015 seems pretty solid so far.
Lastly : What happens if a user of MayaLT2015 with a permanent license rents, say, MayaLT2016 for one month and then cancels the rental plan ? Would MayaLt revert to its 2015 sate as soon as the rental fee is not being paid, or would it incorporate the 2016 features from there on ?
---
As you can probably tell I am not a huge fan of software rental/subscription plans, as they seems financially unsound to me. But at the same time, I am not a huge fan of having to pay more than half of the original price of a permanent license just to obtain an upgrade either I think it would be alright if the upgrade price was somewhere within the $50/$100 range, but paying $500 in order to upgrade a $795 program sounds like a big gamble to me ....
Anyways - thank you in advance for your time
---
On a side note : I managed to fix the issue I was running into earlier regarding shelf editing and saving/exporting not working. It was an issue with PythonPath/PythonHome, which I just solved. Pfiew !
Interesting - I had no idea that a subscription plan not only allows for a year of benefits but also grants access to the next point release. From there I would think that a good move for someone eager to always get on the "next big thing" (=not me ! ) would be to purchase a license + one round of yearly subscription around the middle of the year, in order to get 2 releases + some extra content for them both. Overall I think I now know everything I needed to know about the business model. Thank you again for all the details.
Now I still don't quite understand the logic behind paying extra cash for features that are not even yet designed or implemented, therefore any purchase decision on my end will be based on the current state of the program. Which means, on to some more testing ! The polygon count restriction on export as well as the incompatibility of the file format with regular Maya environments are still issues in my opinion so I'll have to double check if this would affect my potential use of the program.
Maya LT looks good.
I'm trying to figure out, if its Turtle baking capabilities are suitable for proper hard-surface baking.
Does it support something like an averaged normals cage?
Hadn't the chance yet to try it for myself. So could someone enlighten me here.
Ok I tried to get a proper normal map using a simple cube.
Unfortunately, I was not be able to get the desired result. As you can see from the screenshot, there is a obvious seam on the edges, rather than a clean chamfered edge.
My setting was a high poly cube and a simple low poly cube, marked hard, with each face as a separate UV island.
It seems Turtle uses exact the same normals from the low poly mesh to cast the rays for baking, without any option to use averaged normals.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems this makes it not suitable for any hard surface work.
But I hope I simply did a mistake, or someone can show me a solution for this issue.
Interesting - did you try loading up this asset and normalmap into an engine that you know is synced with the regular Maya baker ? After all, the results displayed inside Maya/MayaLT do not matter as much as what is shown inside a proper engine ...
Interesting - did you try loading up this asset and normalmap into an engine that you know is synced with the regular Maya baker ? After all, the results displayed inside Maya/MayaLT do not matter as much as what is shown inside a proper engine ...
I just tried it with Unity and it gave me the same result.
Not having the option for a averaged cage, makes it difficult to bake such things in Maya, I guess.
And since you can't export more than 65K models, external baking apps like Xnormal are out of question
I just tried it with Unity and it gave me the same result.
Not having the option for a averaged cage, makes it difficult to bake such things in Maya, I guess.
And since you can't export more than 65K models, external baking apps like Xnormal are out of question
I think blender lets you bake with cages now. Check the blender 2.71 release notes
Well, it could be argued that Unity is not necessarily synced with MayaLT/Turtle anyways... Or maybe it is ? That's worthy of some tests that's for sure. And since the MayaLT PR stresses how well integrated it is with Unity, it is true that one would expect a perfect sync between these two at least. Interesting stuff.
(and of course, that's one more strong argument against the polygon limitation on export )
I'll try to do some syncing tests on my end later too.
I think blender lets you bake with cages now. Check the blender 2.71 release notes
Yes I know that because that's what I usually use and the new baking in Blender works like a charm.
I just wanted to give Maya LT a spin, because it has apparently some nice UV, Rigging and retopo tools.
But the poly cap and the baking limitations makes it not really useful in some cases, such as hard surface models for games IMO.
Ruka, would using an averaged cage give you a better result given that the target cube is all 90 degree angles? Adding a one segment bevel should produce much better results.
Ruka, would using an averaged cage give you a better result given that the target cube is all 90 degree angles? Adding a one segment bevel should produce much better results.
Isn't that the common practice if you have hard edges with 90 degrees or more, to mark those edges as hard and use a averaged cage for normal map baking? In this case you get clean, gradient-free normal maps. That's what I learned from the sticky in the technical forum here.
Of course you could use bevels to bypass this issue, but that isn't always desirable. Especially for smaller models that don't need tons of detailed geometry.
I just tried the same cube setup with Blender and a averaged cage. And this is what I got. Contrary to the result I got in Maya LT, there are not so obvious seams around the the edges.
So my question is, can I get a equal result in Maya LT?
Yes exactly what I was after!!
I had a similar setup with each side as separate non-overlapping UV island ( which is the common way to avoid seams in bakes)
Did you bake that in Maya LT, or the regular version of Maya, with the described custom envelope?
If this is not available in LT, could you consider this for the next Maya LT updates?
So after an eval, I like it as a whole. If you want to use Maya LT only it's a good product, Viewport 2.0 is slow we have char models around the 25 - 40K poly mark which as we aim for the PC and PS4 market isn't an issue, in Modo a couple of million polys isn't an issue. But it was for VP 2.0, it crawled whenever you did anything.
Secondly we use DDO, which requires color maps and Maya LT doesn't support transfer maps. So I had to use Modo to fill in the gaps, which is a shame really..
As I say good product, but I won't be picking it up.
Thanks for the feedback ShadowKindGames! What sort of hardware were you running on might I ask? Viewport 2.0 should handle dense meshes much better than the older viewport but it can be fussy about hardware or whether you're throwing lots of screen-space effects at it (SSAO, Tesselation, MSAA etc).
Are you not able to use Turtle to output the color maps using the Full Shading output? If we're missing something crtiical let me know and I can investigate.
Cheers,
Shawn
The office machines are GTX 780's, I7 3770K's, 32GB DDR and 2 X 512GB SSD drives.
I think three machines have Nvidia Titans in them.
Appreciate the feedback Shawn, I searched for ages trying to find a way to output color maps. I still have 5 days left of the trial, I'll have a look around.
Reason I want Maya LT is for the rigging and animation, so if we can solve these two were good to go.
Replies
GoZ is just a mel script in the end (not very clean by the way as it require the Mental Ray plugin loaded for no reason).
I personally write all my tools and auto rigging scripts in python. So switching to LT would be a lot to work to rewrite everything to mel.
Also I would think the auto rigger from Jeremy Ernst would be used by indie studios who don't have dedicated riggers more than AAA studios. AAA studios seem make their own tools to work with their current pipeline.
http://pixologic.com/zbrush/features/GoZBrush/
The first video especially provides a good overview.
Essentially GoZ communicates both the mesh along with its associated texture, normal, and displacement maps back and forth between Maya and ZBrush. More importantly, it allows the ZBrush version to remain at very high resolution while the Maya version is at a lower resolution while working in both applications back and forth, making changes to the geometry and textures in either application. It automatically and transparently remaps the geometry and texture changes across the different resolutions as it communicates the changes back and forth.
GoZ runs as a MEL script in Maya but the script won't run in Maya LT due to some missing functionality (such as the missing SYSTEM command). The simplest fix would probably be to just add the missing funcitonality to Maya LT. If that is not workable, I would think that it would be fairly easy to find some simple work arounds for the missing functionality once it is investigated.
Probably, but I'm afraid they will break something along the way.
Not really a direct answer to your question, but I stopped baking my zbrush sculpts in maya specifically because maya didn't read the vertex coloring.
wait, but why can I get the vertex color in Xnormal while baking directly from zbrush?
Do you mean Maya just doesnt read or the obj doesnt get exported with it at all? Sorry, just trying to understand.
OBJ dosnt support color, what is going on is that zbrush saves the extra data as comments appended to the OBJ. XNormal just knows how to read this non standard data zbrush puts in the OBJ.
Although I wonder if it would be good to also have another complementary preference setting for updating tumble pivot to selection when that selection is moved by move, scale or rotate tool.
In View > Camera Tools > Tumble Tool > option box, you can check "tumble on object" and it will tumble around whatever object is under the cursor when you Alt + LMB drag. Kind of neat.
Anyways I just wrote a simple script that auto sets tumble pivot to selection. I didn't see a mel command or procedure that solely sets tumble pivot to selection, so it's a little dirty.
How it works:
I created a scriptjob that runs with every selection change. It just runs "Look at Selection", which sets tumble pivot to selection but also rotates camera, so I rotate the camera back, and I prevent it storing that in the undo queue. So with that roundabout way it ends up only setting tumble pivot to every new selection.
For the script to work, you have to go to In View > Camera Tools > Tumble Tool > option box and for "tumble about:" choose "Tumble Pivot". Changing it back to "Center of interest" will disable it.
Create file named PP_AutoSetTumblePivot.mel and put this code inside:
global proc PP_AutoSetTumblePivot() { int $tumbleSetting = `tumbleCtx -q -localTumble tumbleContext`; if($tumbleSetting == 0) { if(size(`ls -sl`) > 0) { undoInfo -swf 0; float $camRotation[] = `camera -q -rotation "persp"`; viewLookAt "persp"; camera -e -rotation $camRotation[0] $camRotation[1] $camRotation[2] "persp"; undoInfo -swf 1; } } }Create a file named userSetup.mel (if there isn't one already), and put this inside:
Then for Windows OS, place both script files in documents > Maya > scripts
Not sure where the equivalent location is for OSX.
I only briefly tested it on Maya 2014 & 2015 on windows. Let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.
A very BIG THANK YOU from me @Perfect_paradigm! That script does EXACTLY what I was after. This script/functionality should really be an option in future versions. Thanks again! You saved the day
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2085929#post2085929
Primarily we need a Z-brush friendly work flow, most of what well be doing is rigging NPCS. Luckily enough 90% of our character models fall into the biped category. So we mainly just need something for quickly rigging and animating our models and getting them exported into Unity. We may use if for some level architecture (box modelling) also.
Concerns:
Does a one year pre-paid subscription entitle you to upgrades?
Is anyone using Quixel and MayaLT? (I'd just like some workflow experiences)
Seems there is some good stuff about Go-Z here, Autodesk it would be great if you could get that portion working.
We make open world RPG's, I suppose for the price I might as well just buy a couple of licences for testing purposes. But I'm still a little dubious about hitting limitations, we are focused on current gen games for console and PC.
Also, random crashing without any kind of log files is a mess to try and figure out, especially when it seems like my hardware isn't supported (how is this even a thing in 2014?!) by Autodesk Certificates.
The restrictions it has when it comes to having a native plugin environment with certain softwares which are not of an Autodesk build is also a really weird decision (I can see what you guys are doing here, tone it down guys).
No offense, but the maybe the time spent trying to force the user sleep with Nvidia and with your own products could be better spent on actually polishing it?
Sorry for the slow response. I was looking at Extension 1 for Maya LT 2015 and noticed that it now includes Set Driven Keys and the ability to use mathemetical expressions to drive animations via utility nodes. These definitely help a great deal.
The remaining animation features that would be helpful are spline IK (for rigging non-biped characters) and perhaps some additional constraints such as geometry constraints (useful for tying mesh morphing to animation changes, such as making biceps bulge as the arm bends at the elbow).
The FBX capability for Cryengine is currently not very usable. Cryengine currently depends on full Maya or 3ds Max plugin support to communicate 3d models so a "Send to Cryengine" capability would be a very big help. Especially, if it provided the same level of functionality as "Send to Unity" such as unlimited polygon support.
Also, a tight integration with Quixel Suite in Maya LT would be very helpful. I have been discussing this at the Quixel thread on the Polycount forums, see: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2086842#post2086842
Thanks again for the terrific reponsiveness to customer feedback!
What's strange is that if I perform the keyboard shortcut required to send a menu item to the Custom shelf, I can tell from looking at the listener that things are working just fine behind the scenes - I just don't see the shelf itself. Odd !
(note that I've had a few older and outdated demos versions of Maya installed on this machine here and there, so maybe this is all due to some kind of internal conflict ?)
And of course, long-running Maya issues are still present in LT : when working with move set to symmetry, many operations either don't work on the other side of the mesh, or create unexpected results.
Of course seasoned users work their way around the issue (ie working with an instanced copy of the object to be combined/welded later) but I think it can still be considered as something broken - especially since the symmetry option of the move tool is supposed to be such a time saver.
Instance mirror does not work well as symmetry for several reasons so they need to hurry up with proper symmetry.
With symmetry the extrude manipulator doesn't always display on the side you selected. Sometimes it displays on positive side and sometimes on negative side.
Reproduction:
1. Create cube at origin
2. delete bottom face
3. turn on symmetry x
4. select and extrude bottom right edge in positive x
Seriously, stop hoping for working symmetry.
There is a workaround to leave camera perspective and set narrow angle of view, but modeling toolkit gizmo is getting oversized. So it wouldn't help either.
// Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/MayaLT2015/scripts/startup/doOpenFile.mel line 59: Plug-in, "DirectConnect", was not found on MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH. //
Problem is, there is no "DirectConnect" plugin listed in the Plugin-Manager.
I tried reporting the issue a few times over the past days and their Bug Reporting throws a HTTP Status 500 server error.
did you try changing the types of symmetry, for example from object to topology?
I'd would get it in a flash. We should mention that to Autodesk at work to see how they would react...
For quick symmetrize I can reccomend this script in .mel, it quicker and cleaner than using mirror cut
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/cly_pivotreflectionmodeling-mel
I actually started building in the first 20 mins, it seems stripped out and simple to use and I kinda love it. I've only played around with it for an hour or two so far.
Our artists use me as a testing platform, because if I can use it anyone can
I'll report back in a week after I've gotten used to Nurbs / Subd / Shaders / baking and workflow with Z-brush etc. I'll try some rigging and import a sculpted model and see how far I get. Not bad Autodesk, not bad. (So far)
I'm still unsure as to why it has any poly limits at all? It seems it would fit right in as a sleek tool for the games market only. We'll see, time will tell..
Unfiltered texturing works fine in the UV Texture Editor though. Odd.
EDIT: Nevermind what I just said, I just forgot to go into the image file node and set the filtering on that to "Off" as well.
It seems obvious to me that the monthly/yearly rentals (either straight from AD or from Steam) grant constant updates and yearly version upgrades, as long as the rent is being paid (if not paid, I suppose that the product gets de-activated and stops running). But what about users paying the whole $795 upfront (which equals to roughly 26 months of rental) ? Do they get free updates forever, Zbrush style ? Or would that require an extra subscription fee too ? I cannot seem to find these explanations on the AD site...
I feel kinda bad thinking about a user renting LT for two years (=$720), who might have to stop renting for financial reasons, only to be left with no access to the program at all ... Similarly, it would be strange for a one-time purchase user to shell out the equivalent of two years of rent, only to effectively receive one year worth of upgrades and fixes.
I am just a bit confused about it all. Is there a page somewhere with everything clearly explained ?
Sorry if I am being picky but I'd like to make sure I am understanding the following properly, as this is, after all, a rather serious money investment.
Could you please clarify what an extension update is ? For instance I am currently evaluating Maya LT 2015 and I see that there is a service pack for it which installed automatically when I downloaded/installed the trial last week. Is this an example of an extension update that someone who bought LT 2015 when it just came out would flat out not receive ? I remember big service packs for older versions of Max being released quite a long time after a given version was released (this was, of course, before AD moved to a yearly release schedule). Will this still be the case for MayaLT, or will all bug fixes/support stop for a given version after one year ?
I am asking this because I experienced serious issues with my (rather expensive!) Mudbox licenses and upgrades from 2009 to 2012, and most of these bugs never got resolved even after numerous reports and direct contacts with the support team (I even recorded video reports for them). Some of these bugs where, however, fixed in the Mudbox 2015 release according to what I have seen when trying out the trial ... but unfortunately, I am not allowed access to these bug fixes for my slightly too old version, which is quite frustrating and ends up discouraging me from using the program at all in some scenarios. I am afraid of ending in the same situation with a permanent license of MayaLT 2015 - even tho, admittedly, MayaLT2015 seems pretty solid so far.
Lastly : What happens if a user of MayaLT2015 with a permanent license rents, say, MayaLT2016 for one month and then cancels the rental plan ? Would MayaLt revert to its 2015 sate as soon as the rental fee is not being paid, or would it incorporate the 2016 features from there on ?
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As you can probably tell I am not a huge fan of software rental/subscription plans, as they seems financially unsound to me. But at the same time, I am not a huge fan of having to pay more than half of the original price of a permanent license just to obtain an upgrade either
Anyways - thank you in advance for your time
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On a side note : I managed to fix the issue I was running into earlier regarding shelf editing and saving/exporting not working. It was an issue with PythonPath/PythonHome, which I just solved. Pfiew !
Now I still don't quite understand the logic behind paying extra cash for features that are not even yet designed or implemented, therefore any purchase decision on my end will be based on the current state of the program. Which means, on to some more testing ! The polygon count restriction on export as well as the incompatibility of the file format with regular Maya environments are still issues in my opinion so I'll have to double check if this would affect my potential use of the program.
I'm trying to figure out, if its Turtle baking capabilities are suitable for proper hard-surface baking.
Does it support something like an averaged normals cage?
Hadn't the chance yet to try it for myself. So could someone enlighten me here.
Thanks!
Unfortunately, I was not be able to get the desired result. As you can see from the screenshot, there is a obvious seam on the edges, rather than a clean chamfered edge.
My setting was a high poly cube and a simple low poly cube, marked hard, with each face as a separate UV island.
It seems Turtle uses exact the same normals from the low poly mesh to cast the rays for baking, without any option to use averaged normals.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems this makes it not suitable for any hard surface work.
But I hope I simply did a mistake, or someone can show me a solution for this issue.
I just tried it with Unity and it gave me the same result.
Not having the option for a averaged cage, makes it difficult to bake such things in Maya, I guess.
And since you can't export more than 65K models, external baking apps like Xnormal are out of question
I think blender lets you bake with cages now. Check the blender 2.71 release notes
(and of course, that's one more strong argument against the polygon limitation on export
I'll try to do some syncing tests on my end later too.
Yes I know that because that's what I usually use and the new baking in Blender works like a charm.
I just wanted to give Maya LT a spin, because it has apparently some nice UV, Rigging and retopo tools.
But the poly cap and the baking limitations makes it not really useful in some cases, such as hard surface models for games IMO.
Anyway, thanks for your suggestion.
BRING BACK GMAX!
http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax
i aint even mad.
Isn't that the common practice if you have hard edges with 90 degrees or more, to mark those edges as hard and use a averaged cage for normal map baking? In this case you get clean, gradient-free normal maps. That's what I learned from the sticky in the technical forum here.
Of course you could use bevels to bypass this issue, but that isn't always desirable. Especially for smaller models that don't need tons of detailed geometry.
I just tried the same cube setup with Blender and a averaged cage. And this is what I got. Contrary to the result I got in Maya LT, there are not so obvious seams around the the edges.
So my question is, can I get a equal result in Maya LT?
Blender
Maya LT
I had a similar setup with each side as separate non-overlapping UV island ( which is the common way to avoid seams in bakes)
Did you bake that in Maya LT, or the regular version of Maya, with the described custom envelope?
If this is not available in LT, could you consider this for the next Maya LT updates?
Thanks!
Secondly we use DDO, which requires color maps and Maya LT doesn't support transfer maps. So I had to use Modo to fill in the gaps, which is a shame really..
As I say good product, but I won't be picking it up.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get the same results with exact the same settings. Could you attach your Maya files, to have a closer look?
The office machines are GTX 780's, I7 3770K's, 32GB DDR and 2 X 512GB SSD drives.
I think three machines have Nvidia Titans in them.
Appreciate the feedback Shawn, I searched for ages trying to find a way to output color maps. I still have 5 days left of the trial, I'll have a look around.
Reason I want Maya LT is for the rigging and animation, so if we can solve these two were good to go.
I'll try that!