Hi! I have been using maya for a while, but does anyone know where to find tutorials for creating characters, levels, objects etc. for games? Its a little different making 3D for games if i remember correctly (everything need to be/converted into polygons, triangulated, as low poly as possible etc.) Thanks/ Robin

Sure, check out www.cgtalk.com. But, uh, how'd you afford Maya if you dont even know where to get tutorials?

Good luck.

There is something called Maya Personal Learning Edition... also there is a trail version... and once again also... Im in school so the students are allowed to have a full copy on their computers... we isnt going to learn Maya just yet but I want to start ahead :)

Oh, and the site you gave is just a forum. Is there a link to a site with Maya tutorials, which also has tutorials for creating stuff for games?

The requirements for creating 3d assets and materials in Maya for games depends on the engine the game is using and the target system the game is being developed for. Where I work I get to use a variety of engines including several proprietary ones, although the Unreal 3 Engine seems to be the engine I use most often.

So the first thing you need to find out is what engine you're creating your assets for. The other important thing to consider is what type of game you are creating the artwork for. The polycount for a character in an RTS game will be significantly lower than the polycount for the same character in an FPS or adventure game for example. Also, in an outdoor FPS or adventure game it may be necessary to have LOD's for each object, but in an indoor FPS or RTS game where the camera is fixed LOD's won't be necessary.

If you don't know what you're aiming for and this is more of a general question then I would offer these basic suggestions:
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1) Know the scale conversion between Maya's units and the engines units before you start modeling. You can always scale things later if you're working on simple static meshes, but this can become a huge problem if you're working on something with a complex hierarchy or rig such as a character or vehicle. In the Unreal Editor for example 16 units roughly equals a foot. So to make a 6 foot tall character he/she would need to be 96 units tall in Maya.

2) Initially model everything in quads, but expect to convert everything to tris before exporting.

3) If you are creating art assets for an engine that supports advanced shaders with normal mapping and occlusion mapping it's usually a good idea to create the high resolution detail model before creating the game model. Once the high-res model is created you can create the lower poly game model to fit around the high-res version. If you're working with LOD's make sure that you create the highest res LOD first to match the detail model. This holds true in most cases, but in some situations you may have to create the game model before the detail model.

4) In general when creating LOD's for your models you want to cut the polycount for each subsequent LOD by half. So if LOD 1 (the highest res game model) is 2800 triangles, the LOD 2 should be about 1400 triangles, and LOD3 should be about 700 triangles. These are just rough estimates as an example.

5) When creating a collision mesh for your objects try to make the collision mesh as convex as possible. This means that you don't want to cut holes or inward gaps into the model unless it is a significant feature. You should do some research on convex objects if you're not familiar with this concept.

Again, these are just general guidelines. I'm not going to give any specific polycounts for meshes because as I said it all depends on the engine, target system, and type of game. If you could give this information I could probably be more specific.

Edit: I almost forgot. It's also very important to know what the up axis is in the editor that you plan on importing your art assets into. By default, the up axis in Maya is Y, but in many game editors the up axis is Z such as Unreal for example. I didn't pay attention to this when I first started playing around with Unreal Ed and I ended up having to flip everything on the X axis to get things positioned where I wanted them in the level.

Thanks, I dont know what game engine we are going to use, but we will mod games like Half Life 2 so its a game engine that supports graphics like the ones in that game.

What I wanna know is what parts of maya you can use for game graphics (for example I know that you cannot use dynamics like fire and smoke, and if you model with nurbs you have to convert it to polygons when finnished). Also, do you need a plugin or something to export to .x format (DirectX). It's questions like these I have... just in general what you should think of (When making stuff for movies you can just throw in and do pretty much whatever you like, 200 polygons more or less wont matter, just result in shorter/longer render times).

Thanks/ Robin

So, basically you're wanting everyone to spill the beans on everything they've spent years learning for themselves? [wink]

On the DirectX question, take a gander at the Exporting to DirectX from Maya 7 thread stickied at the top of this very forum.

What you can use in Maya for games really depends on the game and the exporter/file formats you're using. In general, you can expect to get polygons, animation data sets, and UV mapping for texturing. Most games don't reallt take much more than that out of Maya. Again, though, it is going to depend on the game. If you're interested in developing for Half-life 2, you need to purchase the game (if you haven't already), install the SDK, and then start peering through the gazillions of tutorials they already have for it. Developing for HL2 is well documented.

On other miscellaneous tutorials, check the stickied tutorials thread. I also like simplymaya.com alot.

Actually, one engine that I'm using for a multi-platform game being developed for the XBox 360 and PS3 actually is directly integrated into Maya. There is no seperate external editor that you have to import your assets into. You literally create everything in Maya and save your final assets and scenes as MA files. No X file or proprietary format to worry about.

Additionally, almost anything you can do in Maya (aside from cloth, fur, paint effects, and fluid dynamics) can be used in the engine. You can designate one of your Maya viewports as a preview window to see the actual game engine results. The results are as good as anything I've seen for the Unreal 3 Engine, and I've worked on quite a few games that use Unreal 3.

Unfortunately, do to NDA restrictions I can't say what the engine is or what game it's being used for. This just reiterates my point though that what can and can't be done in Maya for games really depends on the engine.