arsh's maya questions
polycounter lvl 18
hey there guys and girls, new job new 3d package. i have been digging through maya for about a week and its seems like its going to be a pretty smooth transistion, i have found all the tools i use in max, either in maya are through scripts and plugins. i can use maya pretty well to do what i need to,but i am sure i am going to have the random question or here and there until i am comfortable with it.So i started this thread as i place where i can call on the knowledge of the maya gurus that hang out around these parts.
right now i have got to the point where i am customizing it to best suit my workflow and there are some things i cant find in the hotkey editor.
FIRST QUESTION
hotkey edior
one is x-ray mode, would love to toggle this on and off at times but i cant find it in the super list in the hotkey editor. the other is for show wireframe on shaded, i would also like to be able to toggle this. i have actually found a way to toggle the wireframe using nex, but its a bit different than the way maya does it cause it seems to affect smoothed models with a proxy making the proxy dissapear when toggled as the maya versions lets you see the edges and components of the proxy and not all the edges of the smoothed model. any help in locating these would be cool.
I have noticed both of these are located in the panel drop downs and the only category i could find with panel entries is the "modeling panel" unfortunately its only a few entries.
i have tried the handy search option in the hotkey editor to no avail, any help locating these would be cool. if i cant find them i will probably just write little mel scripts for them, as i know how to map those to hotkeys.
Stay Tuned!!! as i am sure i will have more questions.
i will try to turn here as a last resort as i am pretty good at using the documentation.
***EDIT***
Oh yeah to clear any confusion i am using maya version 8.5
right now i have got to the point where i am customizing it to best suit my workflow and there are some things i cant find in the hotkey editor.
FIRST QUESTION
hotkey edior
one is x-ray mode, would love to toggle this on and off at times but i cant find it in the super list in the hotkey editor. the other is for show wireframe on shaded, i would also like to be able to toggle this. i have actually found a way to toggle the wireframe using nex, but its a bit different than the way maya does it cause it seems to affect smoothed models with a proxy making the proxy dissapear when toggled as the maya versions lets you see the edges and components of the proxy and not all the edges of the smoothed model. any help in locating these would be cool.
I have noticed both of these are located in the panel drop downs and the only category i could find with panel entries is the "modeling panel" unfortunately its only a few entries.
i have tried the handy search option in the hotkey editor to no avail, any help locating these would be cool. if i cant find them i will probably just write little mel scripts for them, as i know how to map those to hotkeys.
Stay Tuned!!! as i am sure i will have more questions.
i will try to turn here as a last resort as i am pretty good at using the documentation.
***EDIT***
Oh yeah to clear any confusion i am using maya version 8.5
Replies
http://www.3d-palace.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11429
{//XRAY TOGGLE
string $sel[];
int $toggle;
$sel = `ls -sl -o -dag -l -s`;
for ($obj in $sel)
{
int $temp[] = `displaySurface -q -xRay $obj`;
$toggle = $temp[0];
if ($toggle == 1)
displaySurface -xRay 0 $obj;
else
displaySurface -xRay 1 $obj;
}
}
Hope that spares you from having to write one yourself!
NEW QUESTION
okay i have all my hotkeys where i want them, how hard is it to transfer these setting to another copy of maya?
in max its just a file i can save and load, is there similar functionality in maya to save my layout settings and hotkeys?
thanks again.
also, im really jealous that you get to work at insomniac.
Edit - prefs folder holds the hotkeys in a mel file
I also had to do the switch and after a week worth of asking my workmate questions every 5 min everything was smooth. We have a very handy set of readymade shortcuts and menus to make maya much more handy to work with. I obviously can't share the pack but I guess I could dig up some tips and post bits of it here.
Any recommended scripts btw? Mjpolytools was the only one I really had to install and I was wondering which ones you installed yourself.
But yeah Maya is cool. There are nice things to be done in the layout preset menu on the left also - like, clicking one of the layout icons to switch straight from full a perspective view to a two-windowed layout with the model in one window and it's UVs in the other.
The new Autodesk Maya icon is awful tho!
http://jakob.welner.dk/omtwiki/index.php/Main_Page
got a nice connect tool
i got a few nice tools but their at my work machine so i guess it has to wait til monday.. Target weld, detach to name some
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
if (`getPanel -to (eval("getPanel -withFocus"))`)
{
$currentPanel = `getPanel -withFocus`;
if (`modelEditor -q -xray $currentPanel`)
{
modelEditor -edit -xray 0 $currentPanel;
}
else
{
modelEditor -edit -xray 1 $currentPanel;
}
</pre><hr />
Comet scripts also. They have a lot of interesting and useful animation scripts, like weight export/import (as in exporting the actual numbers, not a uvmap like Maya's exporter).
Just set the weighting to 0.5 in the options and it'll automatically snap to the middle of each edge.
MAX to MAYA
quick and easy
by ArshleVonBody
Recently i got a job offer for a company that uses a maya pipe. unfortunately i have little maya experience, so i have about 2 weeks to get up to speed.
I have developed a pretty easy way to get yourself up and running in maya if your a max user, and i think that this technique can really be applied to any 3d app.
I will be touching on maya and max specific terms, but if you read between the lines at the overall approach it should be able to be translated very easy to other
packages. I hope this method can help others struggling with a software switch, as the industry grows and studios close and open, your opportunities can nearly double if
you can use more than just one package, not to mention it opens the doors to other fields outside the game industry such as commercials, music videos, and film.
This guide is only for modeling but the idea expressed can be applied to uv/texturing as well.
lets get started!!
1. Document your workflow.
If your like me making models is just second nature you never stop to think about what you are really doing you just do it. So the first thing i did was make a little test model in max.
As i was making it i wrote down every tool i use, every manipulator, the move and rotate tools, cut, extrude, all of it, every time i used a new tool,change to wireframe mode, x-ray mode, i wrote it down and what i cam up with is a list
of things i use when modeling in max. yours may be totally different than mine because you may work differently, you may be a box modeler, or a strip modeler, or both. I can not stress how important this step is.
To really transfer your workflow you need to be able to do everything you could in your old package. so here is the list i came up with.
move
rotate
scale
vertex mode
edge mode
poly mode
object mode
bridge
target weld
x-ray mode
wireframe toggle on smoothed model
wireframe mode
smooth shaded/texture mode
backface cull
collapse
grow/shrink selection
cut tool
bevel/chamfer
extrude
soft selection
sculpt tool, smooth
brush size of sculpt tool
brush strength of sculpt tool
repeat last
toggle smooth/turbo smooth
paint select
select border or open edges
Your list may differ but this guide is not something to be copied exactly but adapted to the way you work.
2.Do NOT do any tutorials yet!
The first thing your probably going to want to do is tutorials, well i say NO!!! what is going to happen is your going to be doing a tutorial from a maya user, well your not a maya user. what you really need to focus on first is doing everything the same way you do it in max, that way when you start the job you can hit the ground running and be modeling and texturing at full speed. I recommend after you finish duplicating your current workflow in maya then watch or do tutorials to see if maya can do things faster or better than max then slowly start to incorporate these things into your workflow. but changing the way you work completely can lead to huge slowdowns, i am sure you have spent years learning to use max to level you are currently at, if you really want to start from the ground up again just be warned that its not a very quick process.
3.Open maya and start hitting buttons
Okay now is where you open up maya and start finding all the tools that you use and see whats the same and whats different.
right away you will notice many differences in the package but do not worry.. only worry about the functions that are the same from maya to max. get a feel for the tools and there respective names and on what drop down menus they are located in. You might not be like me, but i wanted to just sit down to maya and not think twice about what i was doing, so first thing i did was note what tools work exactly the same and make their respective shortcuts the same in the hotkey editor.
i didn't bother changing the navigation, it wasn't hard to just press alt all the time, and use shift and ctrl to add and subtract from my selections. now make a list of all the tools that do not work the same or are more of a pain in the ass to use than max.
4. If Maya doesn't do it, someone has already made a script for it.
yup this was the best part of the experience for me, the thousand upon thousands of mel scripts that have been written for maya to make it do pretty much anything you would want it to do. so i went out and found some of the most popular modeling scripts. personally i got MJ POLY tools , cps tools, and NEX. each of these offered tools i like in max and in the case of NEX just blew max out of the water.
in MJ POLY TOOLS i really only use the connect tool, but its really slow sometimes, even with the history cleared, so i might go looking for another one.
in cps i opened the tool box and found several icons that changed the way objects where viewed, like wireframe on shaded and xray mode, these things are not found in the maya
hotkey editor, so i opened up the script editor by clicking the little icon in the lower right of the screen and started hitting those cps icons, what i got were short little commands like this
cpsc_control toggleXRay;
now that i have this i can copy and paste it in the hotkey editor and slap a shortcut on it. this can also be done with a lot of maya's commands, unfortunately when you switch to x-ray mode or edged faces you dont get anything, so thank god for scripts!!
okay now NEX is a life saver, this handy script is phenomenal. right away you will notice the similar vert/edge/poly modes, and if you make a vert selection you can ctrl click on edges or polies to convert the selection, it also works in the other direction too, just like max. also just double click an edge for a loop, or select one edge and cntrl shift double click the next consecutive edge to select a ring, you can click an edge further down to make a partial ring selections.
it also has another mode max does not have and that is component mode. its a tweak mode where you have access to verts, edges, and polies and the same time, and you can edit any of them thanks to selection highlighting.
also if you hold down shift+ctrl and mmb drag on an open edge is like holding shift drag in max and extrudes the edge, well here is where it gets really smart cause you can do the same thing over a poly with NEX and it is extruded, and if you do it on a closed edge it chamfers it, same with verts.. so what you have in nex is a very easy to use modeling tool. also there is a great soft selection you can inable by hitting "B" and by holding B and draging MMB you can change the size of the soft selection falloff.. this is also nice cause when you use the sculpt polygon tool the shortcut is the same for changing brush size, you can also hold M in sculpt poly mode to change the strength.
These are just the scripts i found, there are many more and i urge you to find the ones that work for you best.
NEX is 150 bucks but its totally worth it if you are coming from max and want a similar feel. After using it for a bit i felt that it was actually done better than max and i was modeling even faster than i do in max thanks to the handy component mode.
check out the example vids here for more info.
5. wrapping it up
Now that you have tried out all your scripts and got maya to do everything your max does you can start by making a logical hotkey set.
I use a Cintiq so i have mapped all my shortcuts to my left hand, so my right hand never has to leave the screen. keys that are easy to reach i put several commomly used commands on them with the alt and ctrl and alt+ctrl modifiers.
I did this with max, so i just copied all the shorcuts i had made from that, but if you just use the standard out of the box shortcuts then map those.
6. make some practice models
make a series of small quick practice models, what this will do will get you very comfortable with the interface and your new tool set. i found after 3 little doodles it was all second nature to me just like max.
edit - just saw your post! It's funny tho I learned it in a very different manner. I was lucky enough to sit next to the tool/pipeline technical artist hence I could ask 'hey how can I do that in maya?' every now and then. He answered quite precisely and this on top of a short briefing of the main modeling tools was a nice way to start. I guess it all depends whether you are to learn it on your own or if you can have a personal teacher for a given training time.
Oh btw! I don't know if it's a maya default setting or something custom made but alt+b changes the viewport background color on the fly, default>black>midgrey>default. It's awesome!
i tried some tutorials at first but i just kept thinking, why is he doing it that way??? it would be easier if maya did so and so like max, so thats when my mission just became making maya do what i do in max, and that was much easier.
Know what you want to do then ask/figure out how to do it. Keep it simple then start working towards more elaborate shit.
I still love maya though
I finally figured out how to write a hotkey script to toggle between smooth/flat shaded and some other toggle display options now. If anyone knows of a better way please let me know.
if (`getPanel -to (eval("getPanel -withFocus"))`)
{
$currentPanel = `getPanel -withFocus`;
if (`modelEditor -q -displayAppearance $currentPanel`=="smoothShaded")
{
modelEditor -edit -displayAppearance flatShaded $currentPanel;
}
else
{
modelEditor -edit -displayAppearance smoothShaded $currentPanel;
}
}
It seems to work, but I hope it doesn't crash Maya like my old script.
Script Editor : History > Echo All Commands
Whenever you do anything in Maya from when you turn this option on, it will list the melscripts Maya had to run in order to perform the action, in the script editor's history. You can then copy and paste the parts of code you need out of there. I used this to make a melscript that is similar to Polygon Split Edges, but always puts the edge at exactly 50% or midpoint, to start with. You can do even further customization.
is there a way to view realtime shaders, such as HLSL in the maya viewport? this was a great feature in max since i have been making a lot of my own shaders latley.
You can wire up a Blinn/Lambert/Phong/etc and turn on High Quality Preview, though. Actually, I like this way better than FX shaders, because I can edit my PSD's and see them update real-time.
i dont really like just using blinn shaders cause it will look nothing like that in game, so using .fx files is better for tweaking color normal and spec.
so maya dosent support realtime updates on textures?
another question is that i can only preview upto 256 on textures in the viewport, is there a way around this?? seems very limiting, i would think a package like maya should support as much res as your video card can handle.
Nex is awesome, I'd recommend it. With it installed, as soon as you save your texture in Photoshop it will update in maya without a button press required.
Renderer > High Quality Rendering [](Options) > Color Texture Resolution / Bump Texture Resolution
Edit: Apparently I can't test it because the integrated videocard on my laptop does not support hardware shading in maya (or so the error message says).
And what Daz said.
after about a week with the beast i can say i think i like maya better than max, just was never forced to use it. everything seems much more thought out and integrated.
but they did just released polyboost 3 for max, and i am a bit jealous of a few of the new features.
nex is still in its infancy though, i am sure there are many awesome features to come.
thanks again for the mucho help going on in this thread.
Is there a feature in Maya that is similar to Max smooth mesh? I know Maya has a smooth mesh option, but it seems to lack the Max's ability to set smooth faces groups and materials.
I have tried adjusting the options in Maya's smooth mesh, but the result ends up making curved edges all straight. The sudivision mode works, but I would have to set all the edges to hard/partially hard. It would be easier to export it to Max, but is there another way or plugin available for Maya?
any protips on keeping squeekey clean meshes?
Also, click the mesh, go to your Attribute Editor, Render Stats -> Doubled Sided (uncheck it), you can also do Polygon Display Options -> normals, and make sure your normals are correct, you don't have any mysterious border edges, etc. Also, Polygons -> Cleanup.
All these tools are best explained in the Maya Help files, to learn what each thing does.
Also, there are alot of options in the Smooth command. It is worth the time to learn what each one does (Smooth is especially important when combined with hard normals... you can keep them intact).
Daz, yeah man, using version 8.. i have no clue being new to maya and all.sometimes the smooth command or the proxy smooth dont work at all, and the only fix i have found is to export as an obj, i have used the clean mesh tool it worked one time, and anothertime i went into the hypergraph and deleted everything attached to my mesh but my mesh and that worked a few times as well but not everytime. exporting as an obj works everytime though.. not really sure what is going down.
It may be something completely unrelated, but thats what it sounds like to me.
thanks again for all the help. i have been learning so much everyday, its a little overwhelming, but i have been having a blast.
another note, i think maya wins the most crashable 3d app award.. hahaha and i remember in the great app wars hearing how stable it was.. i average 2 to 5 crashes per day.. again, this might be something with the tools, guys at work said i will just have to learn what i can and cant do in maya in respect to keeping it from crashing..
The exception is the Direct X exporter plugin. I couldn't press Ctrl+Shift for a month because Maya would freeze every time.
3dmax_to_maya.pdf
To echo what other people have said, Maya is pretty stable out of the box, its when you start adding custom plugins and scripts to it that it starts to get wonky.
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and it just so happens you need a program like nex to get maya to do what you want it to.
I don't want to come off as a maya hater, I'm using it at work as well.
But I have a question and if any of you maya pros can answer it you are smarter than the maya instructor I went to:
Maya has a function that will turn your edges without your permission. It is a feature that is used in High Poly animation, it will try to find out the best way for a certain edge to be displayed depending on the angle of the mesh in the viewport. If you don't believe me I'll find an example. How do you turn this off???
AND! in High quality Rendering mode in the viewport, is there any way to get alpha to work while looking at my spec,bump, normal? Alpha does not seem to work in High Quality Rendering AND! alpha only seems to work with a 32bit targa as your texture file. If you use a psd with a .jpg for your alpha it will not work.
Please prove me wrong.
Sorry I don't want to Hijack your Thread Arsh, but I think we are in the sameboat and I want to know if you have encountered any of this and if so, how you overcame it
Maya Guy: WRITE A SCRIPT!
Me: Shut up.
AND! in High quality Rendering mode in the viewport, is there any way to get alpha to work while looking at my spec,bump, normal? Alpha does not seem to work in High Quality Rendering
[/ QUOTE ]
There is a thread about this, very recent. Look it up. Prove yourself wrong.
[ QUOTE ]
AND! alpha only seems to work with a 32bit targa as your texture file. If you use a psd with a .jpg for your alpha it will not work.
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"Alpha is Luminance" checkbox
CLICK!
If so Does the Professor concur with Pior's Assesment? Disconnect all the alpha bits and re-attach?
Now keep in mind I know about the polygon alpha sorting option, my problem is getting alpha to work in High Quality Rendering
polygon alpha sorting only works in Default rendering mode.
and the fact that it's even an option is a bit much, I mean who out there is like "I don't want my alpha's to work"
I should shut up I'm sure somebodys gonna pipe up with "I love to see my alphas jacked up when I'm working!
Secondly, yes maya tries to triangulate the quads to keep a smooth polygon flow, and it updates as the mesh changes. if its REALLY a horrible issue for you just triangulate the mesh first. Then the edges will stay put.
Also a good 90% of the things I hear people complain about maya "not having" are there, they just don't look because the tool isn't labeled EXACTLY what their brain wants it to be.
in viewport painting? got it, UV relax? got it, Geometry sculpting? got it. Sure the display doesn't update ONLY what you are painting on so its not quite as efficient as zbrush or mudbox, but if you stick to local subdivision you can rival their speed. I know my little laptop here starts to chug at the same poly level in mudbox as it does in maya. :shrug:
"Maya has a function that will turn your edges without your permission.....it will try to find out the best way for a certain edge to be displayed depending on the angle of the mesh in the viewport.... How do you turn this off???"
Unfortunately it seems thats hard coded in, we tried to get around it at work but its in the bowels of Maya.
I thought that Autodesk would have looked into this myself when they bought Maya out but alas all they did was make it worse with 8.5, now you have this weird reuse triangle option that makes your texture turn when the edges turn lol.
The only thing that fixes it is to manually triangulate the character.
*edit* sorry didn't read that you'd already posted the solution Vailias.
I think the "issue" is that max treats the mesh as triangles always, but just doesn't show the mid edges to the user, whereas maya treats ngons as ngons and the render routines do the triangulation.