5 days in Maya, not a clue what I'm doing, help me out?

# 1 29-05-2011 , 06:20 PM

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5 days in Maya, not a clue what I'm doing, help me out?

Hi all,

As you can see above, I'm making a heavily-armed rooster in Maya, I've only been using the thing (or any 3D modelling software) for 5 days, and I've done 3 or 4 tutorials from the .pdf which came with it and that's all. There are a few things I'm a bit confused about thus far so if someone in-the-know could answer my questions, it would be much appreciated,

A) Should I be worried about overlapping meshes? For example my cockerel's neck and face are two seperate meshes, and I've just pushed them together to overlap. Is that a big deal? Is there a way in which I can select two meshes and have them combine? I know of the Mesh > Combine function within Maya but all that does is lock them together, rather than get rid of the overlaps and make them into a single mesh.

B) The reason I'm using Maya in the first place is to make static meshes and characters to import into UDK for making my own games (I'm actually a sound designer for video games and I'm looking into expanding my usefullness) so with this in mind should I still be using the 'Extract' and 'Unfold' method for texturing? It seems strange to me as you end up importing a seperate texture for each seperate section of the model, and it was my understanding that meshes in games only have 1 texture applied to them? Do I need to do some sort of Combine function on all of the textures to make one big UV map?

C) What is the general workflow for creating an animated character? Should I animate in Maya and the animations will export with it? Or should I export the mesh and animate it in UDK? Or something else althogether? I really am entirely clueless, I've trailed through 100+ UDK tutorials but they don't mention much about what you do when you want to create original content. /confused

D) If you're feeling adventurous please have a quick look over my model and tell me what obvious mistakes I've made, how I might tidy it up? Basically give me an ear-full for being such a nooblet. (Maya 2012); https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14392951/rooster_help.mb

Thanks a tonne to anyone who takes up the task of dealing with me user added image

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Last edited by KartoonHead; 29-05-2011 at 06:22 PM.

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# 2 30-05-2011 , 02:17 AM

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Nice rooster user added image

Question A: it depends overlapping mesh is'nt that bad unless it looks bad on the outside. I reccomend you try and get into the habbit of making your geometery clean. You can cobine the 2 mesh's together by using the cobine tool, that will just make it into one object not joined. If you want to join then i would snap the verticies of both of the mesh's edges (i think you press c to snap to point) and try and join them together making sure its clean ( use the split polygon tool ect. To make it flow better). Once verticies alligned you can combine the 2 then merge the verticies that you snapped. user added image

Hope that made sense not total junk user added image

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Last edited by monkey99; 30-05-2011 at 02:26 AM.

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# 3 30-05-2011 , 09:19 PM

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A) to properly 'fuse' a mesh with another one you can do mesh > combine and then select the vertices, match them up and merge them
if the meshes have the same number of verts and they line up perfectly on both meshes then it's a trivial task. Otherwise you'll have to add/remove some edges until it does and the topology flows better. There is a topology thread at the top of this forum, you should take a look at that and it should help in topology matters
Also, to snap something to a vertex you hold down v as you move it, not c. hold down x to snap to grid points. use c to snap to a curve.

B) a sound designer looking to go visual huh? you have my respect already
With game models you generally want to use as few texture maps as possible. The reason is so the computer doesn't have to waste time loading and switching between textures.
the way texture maps work is there is a 2D space and on that 2D space you have your verts in 3D. Each point in 3D maps to a 2D point and that 3D point is coloured the same as the corresponding 2D point. What you can do is move the 2D points to a corner of the UV grid for one mesh and do the same for another mesh but put the points into a different corner. I'd show you an example but i dont have access to Maya at the moment. Maybe someone else will show you if I dont first

C) I've never used UDK, but i have used Source and based on the videos i've seen you create your pre-made animations in Maya and find a way to export them into your game engine. In the case of source there were text files that had the details of the animations that the source engine could read. When you make your animations in Maya you do little bits of it. Like you do a walk cycle for one animation. then you do an animation of turning, and then one for jumping etc.
i'm not overly certain of this process though, maybe someone else can shed some light on this

D) i would but i can't right now user added image

that and i don't think my version of maya is recent enough to read your file

that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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Last edited by Chirone; 30-05-2011 at 09:34 PM.

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# 4 30-05-2011 , 09:32 PM

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D) If you're feeling adventurous please have a quick look over my model and tell me what obvious mistakes I've made, how I might tidy it up? Basically give me an ear-full for being such a nooblet. (Maya 2012); https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14392951/rooster_help.mb

Thanks a tonne to anyone who takes up the task of dealing with me

Originally Posted by KartoonHead

I got an error when trying to open your file. You could try saving it again as a .ma (Although it would be a bit bigger (although you could delete history to counteract that))

https://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/as28g11/

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# 5 31-05-2011 , 07:16 PM

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Thanks so much for the info guys!

As out-of-character as it is, I've done some reading! I understand that there is some way in which I can texture my meshes individually within Maya, then select the whole thing and 'bake' the textures or UV maps or whatever, into a single texture, so I can then export the mesh as a single static actor in UDK, and import a single texture to go over the whole thing. I've found this term 'texture baking' all over the shop, I just can't find someone who explains how to do it! Does anyone here know how this works?

I find making UV maps the biggest pain when modelling but if I could just texture my meshes in little bits and then 'bake' it all into one mesh and one corresponding texture, then I'd be very happy user added image

Am I getting this right or have I misunderstood?

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# 6 31-05-2011 , 08:16 PM

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This should give you A idear on UV mapping, the guns can also be put on the same map in object mode sellect all that you want then auto mapping, sellect all the UVs in UV space move to one side..........dave

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_mapping

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Last edited by daverave; 31-05-2011 at 08:20 PM.

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# 7 31-05-2011 , 09:33 PM

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aah, i totally got distracted last night and forgot to do a few screen shots to help you out...

the texture baking you speak of, i believe that's referring to the transfer maps in the Render menu set. What that does is you get two meshes, and transfer the colours onto the other mesh. So if you have a sphere with a material with a ramp in the colour slot and you transfer that to another sphere then that other sphere will end up with those colours. The transfer maps thing is quite useful for when you've coloured faces on one mesh or if you want to create normal maps.

Either way, if you do it like that or just assign a material you'll end up with the same thing, and you'll need to layout the UVs of the mesh so that they don't overlap and make funny things happen.

again, if someone doesn't beat me to it and if i remember i'll post screen shots of what i'm talking about

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5 days in Maya, not a clue what I'm doing, help me out?

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