This short tutorial implies that you know the basics of Maya. Please refer to the many available Maya Tutorials on the net on how to work with materials (textures) and how to apply them to objects. Just one quick tip: Many drag-and-drop operations in Maya are done with the middle mouse button. You can apply textures/materials to objects this way as well as moving materials from the upper window in the Hypershade Editor to the lower window in order to edit the material (right mouse button -> Graph).

With the method described below you can use all methods that Maya offers to texture and light your object and then export the resulting texture to SL. The result is a straight bitmap; I haven’t yet worked with transparencies (alpha), but that should be perfectly possible, too. The process of converting all the Maya materials and lights into one single texture is called baking. Its big advantage is that all UV mapping coordinates are generated automatically and you can precisely texture even very complex sculpty prims. Depending on the texturing method you use in Maya, the texturing in Maya is more or less work. I used 3D materials in this tutorial – they “wrap” themselves around a 3D object automatically and don’t need any manual editing of texture coordinates.

Download pdf Sculpted Prims with Maya – Modeling, Texturing, Exporting