I really liked it. I was searching for such information. Thanks for sharing such an helpful post.

I wanted to thank you for this great read !! I definitely enjoyed every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post..

Hi, need help. Have constucted model, uv mapped, and textured but when I save it and open it again any where else I have lost all my texture. I am prob over looking something embarissinglt obv due to my newness to 3D, ( using PS & Maya08).

I think its cause your texture source is not present in the computer you are opening in . To "open it again any where else" and find your textures the way they are , you'll have to carry your texture files that have been used as maps. Actually the problem is simple. The "any where else"-computer does not have the textures you've used in your scene, so they can not be seen. Hope I'm right .

I do not get a pop-up window menu when right click on Maya 2010, what am I doing wrong?

I think an extent of five months has been enough to find the solution. Even then, I think you should try the most basic thing, REPAIR (or Re-install) .

Hei love your blog, interesting info you got here, keep it comming. (Y)

this is a great maya tutorial i had to use this in a game

This is a really great way to get into light baking.

You can also use a textured image, and light using mental Ray - to get really nice results. You'll definitely want to uv map your model and ensure that your texture isn't wrapping where it shouldn't (you don't want two UV's using the same area of a texture, because it'll mess up the shadows).

Then you go into the rendering menu - and then Lighting/Shading -> then BatchBake(mentalRay)

I use an old copy (maya 8),so this might be a bit off. This usually works pretty great if I could just remember how to uv map properly.

http://fromthehill.nl/tutorial...

Hi, my question actually concerns the program you mentioned on the "Maya Texture Baking Tutorial" video, PhraseExpress. I was extremely impressed by the program and downloaded it. But I have one question, seeing as I can't really get the arguments down for it. How were you able to do an event function, i.e. myEventFunc event; and then have it print out the given function name and all?

I have successfully gotten it to do so if I highlight the function name and then click the phrase, but I cannot get it to work with the AutoText.

Any help is much appreciated!

And these tutorials are helping a ton! A HUMUNGOUS "Thank you" goes out for these!

update: success! turns out in my Maya noobness, I was modeling in nurbs not polys. Poly/shape models export perfectly as described above.

thanks for the tip John, I'll give that a try.

Hey John,

As someone new to PV3D, your site is an absolute goldmine of resources - thank you for all your hard work and sharing them with the community.

This tut is exactly the work flow example I was looking for, but for some reason I can't get my customTorus.dae to show up in the PV3D implementation described here.

After following this tut verbatim numerous times, I'm at a loss on how to troubleshoot a solution.

I'm guessing the culprit is the .dae I'm exporting from Maya because I've inserted other .dae's into your code and they show up fine.

Furthermore, I've found this link showing the exact setting on the Maya COLLADA exporter http://tinyurl.com/2okfg2 - still no luck.

To complicate matters, after researching some other resources, it seems .dae's come in lots of flavors and some work in this implementation and some don't.

Any insight into why some dae's work and others don't?

If you think you're doing everything right, it's usually a scale issue after it's imported into pv3d. Try setting the scale of the dae to big numbers (50, 100, 200) and see if anything shows up.

Thanks. this is great. I was at the workshop you did in NY a couple days ago, and while we were going over this topic, you tried to do the same thing for EXTRUDED TEXT, but the texture baking was out of whack, and it looked like the letters had stripes on them instead of displaying the correct shadowing. I found a simple solution to correct the problem. here are the steps, including creating the text and texture (in Maya 2009):

1. create > text > Bevel > Apply
2. select the text, then go to Ploygons section (dropdown), then choose Create UVs > Automatic Mapping -- this is the missing step, and will create a correct UV mapping on the text.

(next steps are in your video):
3. create shader (e.g. blinn) and apply to text
4. select both shader and text, and in the hyperShade window goto edit>convert to file texture(maya)[] -- select JPG, 512, 512 and click apply.
5. export the DEA, and hook it all up!

itai

Awesome! Thanks for the tip! I plan on doing a couple uv mapping tuts next week and this definitely helps.