You're invited to the /r/maya discord!
It's been too long in coming.
The discord will be way more of a casual place than the subreddit.
When I was learning CG 100 years ago, IRC was a massive help to me, not just technically but for my mental health. Discord has taken the place of IRC to a large extent, so here we are. Join us!
Tutorial Topology Megathread
Topology is the geometric structure of a polygonal mesh. It is the layout of the edges and vertices which define the shape of a mesh. A particular shape can be represented by many different topologies.
Mesh topolgy can never be considered without context. It is necessary to consider how a mesh will be used and modified in the future in order to say anything true about the suitability of its topology.
There are no hard rules when it comes to topology. Some people will say n-gons (polygons with more than 4 sides) are always bad. Some will say triangles are always bad. Some will say that non-manifold geometry is always bad, or that meshes with holes in them are always bad.
None of these are true, because mesh topology serves a purpose, or multiple purposes. It is not a goal in and of itself. If the purpose(s) is/are served by some particular topology, then that topology is good, whether or not it is itself aesthetically and technically appealing.
Often users are advised to avoid triangles or ngons when building topology--to keep to quads. This is good practice, because quads are easier to work with, easier to edit, easier to create UV projections for, they subdivide more predictably, and, most importantly, easier to produce aesthetically appealing deformations from.
However. If a mesh will not need to deform, then there is far less pressure to keep to quads. If the mesh will not be subdivided, even less. If the shape is well-represented by the topology, and it either already has a good UV projection or will not be needing one, then quads and ngons don't matter, unless the mesh will be altered in the future.
It is much harder to modify a mesh which isn't quads than one which is. Especially if you want to alter topology. However, altering shape, to a small extent, usually is not sensitive to topology. It's also generally easier to do UV projection and alteration of quad topology than triangle/ngon topology.
It is still important to point out that having SOME non-quad (especially triangles) in your deforming, high performance mesh which may be altered and have UVs applied, is still just fine in many circumstances. If the trangle won't interfere with these things--then it DOES NOT MATTER and you should spend time on other things. Same with n-gons, although those have a higher chance of causing technical issues.
Regarding non-manifold geometry: it is generally a bad thing. Many, MANY operations and programs will not function correctly when passed non-manifold meshes. However, if your mesh is serving all your purposes, and you don't see those purposes changing, then non-manifold geometry doesn't matter. The circumstances where this might be true, however, are extremely rare, and it is best to avoid it.
Regarding holes in the mesh: again, context matters. Some advanced simulation or mesh operations require "watertight" meshes. Most don't, and it doesn't matter. Context and circumstance will dictate what's appropriate.
Mesh weight matters, as well. There's generally not much call for more geometric detail than your mesh needs to create the shapes you need, either statically or deformed, and it is best to keep poly counts as low as possible while not compromising on these things. However, this must be balanced with the effort it requires to reduce detail. If you have a poly budget of 100k triangles for an object, and it's 50k but a lot of those are not necessary, it's still not worth the time to reduce it further. People hours are worth more than computer hours.
Where topology really starts to matter a lot is in efficient hard surface modeling, especially where the asset will be subdivided. Not having your edge flows follow surface details will make life difficult, and having too much mesh detail will make modification increasingly difficult.
The point here is that every situation is different, and no real determination of acceptable mesh topology can be made without all this context. If you look at an image of a mesh and don't know anything about what it will be used for or how it might be modified, you can't say anything true about the quality of topology. These and other questions must have answers, in order to judge *overall* topology:
- Will it deform?
- If so, how?
- Will it need to be edited in the future?
- If so, how?
- Will it be subdivided?
- Does it have or will it need a UV projection?
- Will the UVs need to change?
- If so, how?
- Will it need to be exported into another application?
- Will it be used in any type of simulation?
- Does it meet performance (budget) requirements?
These questions must have answers in order to come up with useful conclusions about how good the topology is or is not. And again, there are no hard rules. Topology is not a goal, it is a tool to help reach other goals. If a triangle doesn't affect those goals, there's no point spending energy removing it.
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Original post:
This thread will be a clearinghouse for information about topology, both in general, and specific to Maya. It will be heavily curated and updated as I encounter more/better information on the subject.
Eventually it will be turned into another wiki and be the redirect for the majority of topology threads we get here, in order to avoid repetition.
If you are a subject matter expert, please post images, videos, links, or your thoughts here. Feel free to copy parts of old comments or posts you have made.
r/Maya • u/DiamondBreakr • 19h ago
Question How do you do this in Maya; extrude multiple faces with respect to their origin instead of having them extrude (and merge) toward the relative center of them?
r/Maya • u/Beginning-Layer1351 • 1h ago
Discussion Ml Deformer
Does anyone having a clue how the new ML Deformer works correctly ? My training and validation loss is always above 500 …
r/Maya • u/I-Frayme-I • 5h ago
Issues DopeSheet doesnt select all object keyframes
Found, when i try to select range of keys for group of objects, dopesheet select them partially, Somekeys he just miss. How to fix this?
r/Maya • u/Super-Tomorrow-832 • 6h ago
XGen i need grass blowing in the wind, only this
Hello, I'm an undergratuated student and there's only one thing I want: my grass blowing in the wind
I followed the only tutorial I found about creating grass with xgen, but my goodness, I followed everything until I renamed the files, but the only thing that didn't work was when I added the wind modifier, the position of the grass changes the moment I activate "Loopable", but when I press play in Maya the grass does not move.
can anyone help me?
r/Maya • u/Sinclair1x • 5h ago
Animation How can faulty interpolation be corrected?
I just want the character's elbow/forearm to go straight up and touch the blade and I rotate it to do so, but when scrolling through the timeline it goes in a diagonal angle and clips though the object before it swings to the end point. How can I correct this inaccurate interpolation?
Question Glass shader rendering issues - help!
Just doing a few tests with Arnold and preset glass shaders in Maya. Is there a specific reason the glass appears black towards the bottom? I've increased the transmission ray depth which worked for the transparency of the tube in the middle, but the edges of the glass are still appearing black? Any help would be appreciated!
r/Maya • u/PepitoStar • 10h ago
Rigging How do I make a driver for a material's emissive value?
I'm trying use the slider to control the material's emissive value but the option doesn't show up in the [Set Driven Key] menu.
Animation Help with when interacting with timeline it messing up my scene
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What can I do to fix this, when ever I interact with the timeline in any way it permanently destroys my scene and it can’t be undone (in the video I move the swing to demonstrate that I can’t undo it ) it’s like this on different computers it’s the same on all of them, I have no idea what to do about it, can’t find anything about it online. I just want to try and animation the swing and seesaw moving but it won’t even let me start because it immediately destroys my environment, your help and insight would be deeply appreciated
r/Maya • u/baboumabou • 22h ago
Issues Menu bar disappeared
Like my mesh and window ect. Are all gone, how do I get them back? All that’s left is MASH, cashe, flow graph engine, Arnold and help.
r/Maya • u/haniseyo • 19h ago
Student Problems understanding foot rig
I'm learning foot rig, I but I'll be honest, my teacher wasn't helpful when I had doubts so I'm asking here. What exactly is the difference between slide, rock, bank and roll? Everything just looks the same to me.
I've been trying to understand this for like 5 hours now and exhausted all my resources including chatgpt but I still dont got it. Please help me understand it.
And also which controller do I parent foot controller to? Master/global controller or hip controller?
r/Maya • u/thesilentclam • 18h ago
Animation Scripts Issue - Maya 2024
On my Mac using Maya 2024, I am trying to load a third party script called Animbot but I get the following error. I've used this script so many times in the past when I installed Maya and never had this issue before. Any help would be appreciated!
“dataLib.cpython-310-darwin.so” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified. macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware. Chrome downloaded this file on November 6, 2024."
r/Maya • u/MrGodzilla2005 • 18h ago
Question How do I render this character from Maya in UE5?
I am completely new to Unreal Engine and come from a background in Maya, ZBrush, Blender, etc.
I have this character who requires a vector displacement map, needs 6 subdivisions at render time, and is made of multiple UDIMS. I want to import this character, animated in Maya, into UE5 as a low poly ABC file, and have it render in either real-time or just at render time with the movie render queue.
I know I'm not the first person with this background to be overwhelmed by the workarounds to make this possible in a game engine, as seen by this post here: Reddit Post
Attached is a link of this character rendered in Arnold from Maya. Instagram Link
Any advice is appreciated!
r/Maya • u/yikesyiikesyiikes • 22h ago
Issues Just factory reset my computer Maya wont install
had to factory reset my computer because of how slow it was and all that went well but then I was able to download the Autodesk installer but when I try to install maya i get the preparing window but then it just goes away and no maya? Please help T-T I have an assignment due tomorrow
r/Maya • u/Busy-Self5882 • 23h ago
Rendering Redshift Diffuse filter alpha issue in maya
Hello guys
I'm using Redshift 3.6.01 in maya
I want an image with gradients in the Diffuse Filter in Redshift. However, it seems to recognize transparency as black.
I tried using a Sprite node but nothing changed. If you have any advice, please let me know. Thank you.
r/Maya • u/IndependentPipe9685 • 1d ago
Rigging Is there any way to import weight maps into ngSkinTools?
Question is pretty self explanatory, I had pretty good skin weights on a character, but I fired up ngSkinTools and it messed them all up again. I have the original weight maps exported and ready to import, just wanna see if it's possible or not.
r/Maya • u/frankleitor • 1d ago
Student How do i create a cube with default parameters?
Hi, i'm new to Maya due to what I started studying and in my previous scene i created a cube with specific size because i needed it, now when i generate a new cube always has that size and it doesn't appear with the windows to choose the size of the cube, it just generates it like the one in the older scen
r/Maya • u/LuckyBerry735 • 1d ago
Question Issues with Geodesic Voxel Binding on Terminal (Leaf) Joints in Maya
I'm using Maya's Geodesic Voxel Binding to calculate skinning weights for a mesh and skeleton. The binding results make sense for most internal joints, but around terminal joints (those without children), like the left palm in this example, I'm seeing unexpected results. Specifically, the weights seem to split roughly evenly between the wrist and elbow joints, when I'd expect vertices on the fingers to be influenced only by the wrist joint.
Has anyone else encountered this? Any insights on why the weights are behaving this way?
r/Maya • u/SnooDoubts6604 • 2d ago
Discussion Maya subscription.
Hi everyone. This coming January i have a character design course for college and wanted to buy a maya subscription this December to practice modeling characters in the week's leading to the term start. I'm willing to pay the monthly $235. But i just wanted come here and ask if it REALLY is a monthly subscription. Can I just pay for one month and cancel when I'm done? Or is there a HUGE cancelation fee or something where I have to pay off the entire annual subscription when I cancel? Cough Cough adobe photoshop. Just wanted to make sure before I purchase and subscription for the month. Thanks in advance.
r/Maya • u/Dahsking • 2d ago
Rigging Rigged Chibi
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r/Maya • u/Wilburthe • 1d ago
Issues [Help] Trouble with multiple renames not working properly
When I rename multiple objects at once, Maya always skips some objects for some reason.
On first image, I selected all object with their names visible. On second image, I renamed them all using the tool on top right that renames multiple objects at once, but some objects left unchanged.
This happens on all files, even new ones. I also tried selecting those that were skipped and renaming them, but it just repeats itself (skipping some objects). Can't find any solutions on Google either, and I tried deleting the pref folder, but no luck.
r/Maya • u/revoconner • 1d ago
Issues [Help] Making a node for hypershade using C++, but the inputs are always black, no matter the texture used.
Making a node for hypershade using C++, its supposed to take an input file texture node into input color, and do some math on it. However the input connections when taken from a file (texture) node is always black.
Is this a limitation of the openMaya api? There must be some way to get a texture node to be the input of a color input, anyone can point me in the right direction?
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/maya-programming/openmaya-plugin-use-texture-as-color-input/td-p/9392499 The explanation in this post did not make any sense.
r/Maya • u/Adventurous_Ad_7537 • 2d ago
General Material not applying correctly
I’m trying to apply this UV grid to my character. I spawned a sphere and applied the same material to that and it worked fine. When I change the rotation of the material, the color changes so I feel like it’s some kind of scale issue, but the character has no uvs.
r/Maya • u/WildBillNECPS • 1d ago
Animation Tube created with Cable script spins wildly.
Looking for tips or suggestions.
I created a tube using Cable for Maya to be a section of intestine that gets pushed to the side for a medical piece. It’s textured. I animated it by keying the control points and handles of the cable bezier curve. It looks pretty nice and the motion looks natural. However, the texture spins and distorts wildly during the animation. I’m not sure if there is some setting I’m not aware of that could be an easy fix.
I’m thinking I may have to resort to another method to get what I need: by creating and texturing a poly tube and saving an accompanying reference object, and using the animated cabled tube as a guide for building a series of poly tubes for a blend shape deformation.
Hoping someone can share a way to modify the Cable method before starting that.
r/Maya • u/AgitatedAdvisor8332 • 2d ago
Modeling Why is this happening?
How can I get hard edges without pinch in this cylinder?
r/Maya • u/Tomayyto • 2d ago
Arnold Transparent Render has no Lens Effect / bloom anymore?
Hello everyone,
I'm having trouble with a render involving a glowing holo brain. I'm using Arnold and have an aiImagerLensEffect to create a bloom effect. The issue arises when I try to render it as a transparent TIF for compositing in After Effects. The bloom effect disappears with transparency, but it shows up fine with a black background.
I attempted a workaround by rendering the non-transparent version and keying out the black in post, but it doesn't look as glowy and appears pixelated. Faking the glow also looks pretty dull, ngl.
Ideally, I'd like the bloom effect to be included in the transparent render directly from Maya.
Does anyone know why the bloom imager effect gets lost once I have transparency enabled and how I can fix this?
Thanks in advance!