ME, and also ur mother! Honestly i think a lot of the stuff in render's script are default tools in modo's uv editor, i would have to look over it again, but out of the box modo's uv tools leave little to be desired.
Thanks Cholden, I've remade my plant but I still have issues with transparency sorting in maya. The whole plant goes transparent in HQ mode, does anyone know a fix for that? Heres a pic of what I mean. Default Broken
Texturing wise, I would consider bumping up the self illumination and maybe trying the ink and paint shader (if your using Max). It seems as though that stylized approach might showcase your models better rather than the default shading.
They actually added the Working Pivot stuff (it now works more like Maya / Lightwave as you give examples here) in Max 2008, so you can put the pivot anywhere dynamically without losing the object's "default" pivot info.
Nope, you just need a better viewport shader. The default ones are all bad. If it looks correct when rendered, then it will be fine if you use the correct viewport shader. More info about why this happens... http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#TangentBasis
That isa Max2010 exclusive problem, since it doesn'use different Views by default, but converts one to the other...Max 2010 sucks in that regard...earlier versions of Max keep the FoV setting (unless of course you convert the perspective view into an orthografic one...).
It's possible you just forgot to check the "Texture Coordinates" checkbox on the Max OBJ importer, because going between Maya and Max with default, out-of-the-box plugins definitely works The better OBJ export/import plugin is pretty nice though.
Nice, something bothers me about it but I think that's because you didn't have perspective turned on? You can enable perspective on the draw menu at the top of the screen, I like to use a value a bit higher than the default 70.
It's up in the top right by default, in the Colour palette (usually next to one of the tabs like Styles and Swatches), you'll notice that the foreground and background colour swatches can have a little black border around them - click on the foreground one to select it.
Well Daz, when I set the Texture Resolution of the other two materials to Highest (it was on default before), the textures get all fugged up like the origional problem I had! This really dosnt make sense...very weird problem...