Maya and StudioPaint

Before I started working on getting a UV exporter tool up-and-running for Maya, I decided to investigate other tools that may be able to texture models because I found it strange that there wasn’t a way to get the UVs out of Maya, yet there were clearly well textured models that had been made for games and films. On my journey, I discovered StudioPaint. Specifically, version 9.5. This was the last verison of StudioPaint and the last version of Maya that StudioPaint integrates with is 3.0, 4.0 introduced exporting UVs in an image. Though I haven’t investigated how textures were painted on 3D models outside of using something like StudioPaint at the time. Assuming that things such as Substance Painter were relatively new tools and artists relied on using image manipulation tools like PhotoShop, GIMP, or PaintShop.

On my first attempt to create another cube and texture it, there was something weird happening with the texture that only appeared when I checked it out on my Windows workstation. The green channel was strangely offset and smeared across the rest of the surface. It took a few hours to realise that the texture had to be added to the CVS repository with the binary type explicitly set.

Now I can start attempting to process the texture and scale it down from its original size to something that won’t blow the video memory budget.

The workflow is very pleasant so far. As more complex models are created, I’m sure I’ll encounter some issues along the way.

On an unrelated note: the hard drive in my Windows workstation failed and I had to resort to using a 20GB HDD that I had lying around. On the flipside, the RAID0 with the two Seagate 33.6GB 15K RPM drives is working great.