General Maya issues

EarthQuake

Is there any way to manually edit the envelope, IE editing the cage in max, in maya?

If not, what sort of tricks do you guys use to get around that?

MoP

When you add a low-poly mesh in the Transfer Maps window, it automatically generates an "envelope" (basically same as Max's projection cage, except it's an actual mesh object in the scene).

You can then turn on the display of the envelope on its own or both the mesh and envelope (use the drop-down menu ni the Transfer Maps window to the right of the the object name in the Target Meshes list).
You can select the envelope in the viewport and do any vertex/edge/face moving/scaling you need.

EarthQuake

Oh awesome, great thanks man. I'll check that out.

Mongrelman

What can save a lot of time is adjusting the size of the envelope in the transfer maps window so it fits those small, tricky areas, then select the envelope (object mode) and use mesh>sculpt geometry, and then deform the envelope zbrush-style to make it cover the rest of the mesh. You can also subdivide or otherwise edit the envelope.

Just be mindful of the settings, it can automatically delete the envelope (I think after the bake) or not, and if not then when you export the model it can have the envelope object with it if you didn't remove it.

MoP

Yeah there's an option for "delete envelopes on bake" which you might want to hunt around for before trying anything

EarthQuake

MoP wrote: »

Yeah there's an option for "delete envelopes on bake" which you might want to hunt around for before trying anything

Yeah i remember this from a different thread, its on by default so i check this thing whenever i open maya =D

Mongrelman

I personally like to keep the envelopes, as sometimes weird stuff happens, usually when I'm baking the AO across. Often it will bake badly and I need to delete the high poly and then reimport it and bake again. Keeping the envelope means not having to faff around with that again.

But then I also export two models from Blender (where I uv map); one for baking (with the mirrored uvs moved elsewhere) and the actual game model with the final uv layout.

MoP

Mongrelman: Why not just use the "baking" version as the final game model? Any decent engine should handle UVs outside the 0-1 range... if you just move them off by exactly 1 UV unit in any direction it will bake cleanly and also display fine in game.
Unless on your bake mesh you are also moving geometry apart to create a cleaner bake? If so, you will need two meshes obviously... if not, you should only need the one.

Mongrelman

I often bake them in bits anyway, but I just find it easier to have one model with the final uvs, and the other with the mirrored uvs moved elsewhere for clean baking. Only takes me a minute to export the two models then I don't need to bother about moving uvs again.

EarthQuake

One more question. Is there any way to set up in single scene, a way to bake to multiple maps? From what i've seen it seems like you have basically... One Transfer Maps dialog for the entire scene?

So how do you set up objects that need to be baked into separate images, just use another scene?

MoP

Hmm, isn't there something like "Bake Sets" ? I haven't ever used those before, might wanna look them up in the Maya help, see what it reveals...

EarthQuake

Ok a few more things

I'm trying to render an AO map using Transfer maps, but i get what seems to be artifacting from the lowpoly mesh? I seem to remember reading that you need to disable rendering of the lowpoly or something like this, any idea how to do this(i've tried just hiding the object, but then the map renders full white).

Trying to set up some instancing using duplicate as instance, but when i edit my initial object, the "instances" do not update. It seems like it just copies the mesh as it was. Is there some other way to instance other than the options in duplicate?

Also i've tried importaning FBX files from max with instances, but in both cases i get the same result(seemingly just a copied mesh, no "instancing" behavoir).

whipSwitch

I'm using 2k8 and my solution to the lowpoly baking interference in AO was to bake in max. Never did find a way to exclude it from the projection. Searched high and low in forums and such and what a lot of people ended up doing was to do an AO bake on the highpoly, load it as a texture, and then transfer the color in transfer maps. Ive never used bake sets with transfer maps, dunno if it works.

what isn't updating in the instances? Like component manipulation isn't working?

EarthQuake

Is there any non-destructable method for adding sub-d to a mesh other than using SubDiv proxy? This seems to be pretty wanked, needing to have two meshes and all. I've run into some various problems, one example being:

I set up some keyframes on my cage mesh, move the objects around etc, and that all works fine and good. But when i add sub-d to the mesh, it creates a new mesh that has no reference to the keyframed cage mesh. The cage mesh will move, but the "sub-d" mesh stays in the same spot.

Am i just doing it backwards here, or is there an easier way?

Do i need to add sub-d before, and keyframe both meshes?

claydough

What do you mean by non-destructible?

Otherwise...
from the polygon menu set >
mesh> smooth ( the default is for an exponential catmull/clark bicubic division of 1 )

keyframes and skinning inherited fine in my experience.

from the polySmoothFace history input; toggle division back to 0 ( non -destructible? )
or any division level u want. ( u can even toggle this division during animation to compare integrity )

hope that helps?

rebb

Maya 2k8 ( i believe ) added the Smooth Mesh Preview functionality where you can just toggle a mesh between smoothed/unsmoothed state, similar to Lightwave/Modo.

MoP

Unfortunately the Smooth Mesh Preview feature is not renderable, so it's useless if you want to do any AO baking - it ends up baking with the cage mesh rather than the subdivided one. It only shows the subdivided preview in the viewport, and will not render/export it at all.

At work I wrote a script which would convert any Smooth Mesh Preview settings to a polySmooth node in the history, and vice-versa... so for modelling you just always use Smooth Mesh Preview then whenever you want to render/export you just hit "Add Smooths" and it will convert every selected mesh's preview to a proper subdivision node in the history. Then once you're done with it, you just hit "Remove Smooths" and it deletes them all off the history and brings the settings back to the Smooth Mesh Preview.

That's as close to non-destructive (and actually useful) as I've managed so far. I have no idea why their smooth mesh preview isn't renderable, it's ridiculous.

To get a little bit of this functionality, look in Modify -> Convert -> Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons.
The Smooth Mesh preview by default is on the hotkeys 1-3 (1 is off, 2 is smoothed, 3 is with wireframe cage I believe). Again I wrote a script instead so that it just toggles the state on and off. This is quite easy to do even if you're not an experienced scripter, I think.

glib

When I was doing subd in maya I lived and died by this plugin/script:
http://www.henrykorol.com/Scripts/SubdToggle/

Hope it helps.

rebb

Smooth Mesh Preview is renderable in mental-ray since Maya2009, but only in the Render-View and not for Transfer Maps it seems - oh well .

Edit :

Actually it looks like it renders fine in Transfer Maps too, but *only* when choosing the AO or Custom-Shader items.
Which makes sense because the other items don't actually seem to use mental-ray for the baking.

ivars

Bake-sets are only for mental-ray batch bake, so it won't help you with the transfer maps

Envelopes are stored as an extra (hidden) shape node under the objects transform node... in case you need to find it.

Any animation in a transform node will only affect the shapes that are contained in it. That's why the smooth objects won´t move with the proxy. This might also be the case with the instances (an instance is an extra transform node sharing the same shape, and input nodes...) So any transforms on will not be instanced.