When I am working with UV mapping, sometime when I “sew” edges together Maya crashes on me. I can’t figure out the pattern, but it’s hellishly annoying. Has anybody else experienced this, and can tell me under what conditions this happens and how/if I can avoid it.
I do a lot of my texture unwrapping in Blender. When I import it back into Maya (via FBX), I notice that none of the UV vertices are sewn together. Does this mean the UVs with the same coordinates, but not sewn together have to be calculated multiple times in Unity unless I sew them together? Or does Unity automatically do that?
I have to say, being relatively new to Maya . . . I’m a bit disappointed with its stability. Coming from Blender I was expecting Maya to blow me away, but it’s failing to amaze me in many aspects. I realize Maya can do a lot of cool things that Blender can’t – but sheesh, Blender is stacking up against Maya a lot better than I expected.
I’m a maya user and love it, BUT save often because the crashes are unavoidable. I’ve gotten used to saving after almost everything I do. Put the save icon on the shelf and use it all the time. You would think for the price it would be more stable, but it isn’t. Don’t feel bad, I have Modo as well, and that crashes even more. Despite the crashing problems, Maya still kicks ass though.
Unfortunately Maya indeed has some stability issues on OSX. I’ve always felt like the Mac version was a quick and dirty port… there are many quirks that pop up (mostly GUI). However, I also used Maya on Windows for a couple years and the experience was in fact much worse. The Windows version would just crash whenever it pleased… on the Mac version I have a handful of tools that I KNOW might crash Maya and before I use them I always save. Here’s a quick list from memory of functions that can potentially cause either an instant crash or a beachball:
• Unfold UVs
• Separate Mesh
• Booleans
• Importing/Merging Scenes
• Applying a Surface Shader (also deleting one that is being used)
• Trying to use any tool before a previous function has finished calculating
As far as sewing edges goes I’ve never had a problem (multiple or otherwise). However, if you’re trying to merge UVs from Blender use “Merge UVs” instead of edge sewing because sewing will try and wrap the entire UV set while ignoring UV shells which could understandably crash Maya.
Sorry to hear that you’re not liking Maya so far, but I really think it will grow on you. Blender might have a lot of the same functionality (if you can struggle through the awful GUI to find it), but Maya is an extremely robust app that has proven itself again and again for nearly a decade and personally I haven’t found another 3D tool over the years that can match it.
Thanks much for the replies! That’s very helpful stuff to know, Ethan.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying Maya, but it’s just not blowing my socks off like I expected. I especially like the modeling tools, they somehow promote cleaner geometry than Blender. I’m just surprised at how well Blender – being free – stacks up against it.
Another tip: I have found, in the 4 years I have been using Maya (on the Mac), that when you get repeated issues like this, it can be helpful to delete your Maya preferences. Sometimes, these files get corrupted and cause particular operations to crash repeatedly. Also, as others have said, save often. One thing you can do as well, is to open the Save option box and turn on incremental saves, and set it to an unlimited amount. I cannot count the number of times I have saved my own rear because I had this enabled and was able to go back to a previous version of a file. Also, be sure to enable unlimited undo’s in the preferences; this, too, can be a lifesaver. And finally, if you take the time to learn MEL scripting, save your files in Maya ASCII, if they get corrupted you can often open the file in a text editor and correct the broken part of the file.
As others have said, I am sorry to hear you are having problems, but, truly, Maya is in a class of it’s own as far as 3D modelers go, and once you can work around some of it’s issues (and TBH, every other 3D app I have used has it’s own set of issues, some of them far far worse than Maya’s), then you will find that for workflow and ease of use, Maya is tip-top.
One of the best things I’ve discovered in crysis time, is that maya can temporarily save a file prior to crash.
Documents>Temp>FileNameByDate
I’ve found the best idea is to Create a new project and import the temp file, as sometimes the global paramenters on the temp file dont work, so if you just open the temp file, sometimes things like save and export dont work.
Please someone answer the question he asked in his first post, i also need to know the answer.
“Does this mean the UVs with the same coordinates, but not sewn together have to be calculated multiple times in Unity unless I sew them together? Or does Unity automatically do that?”
I have completely different use-case (no crashes), where it would be favorable if i could use non-sewn UVs, as opposed to sewn UVs (think using just faces - hard edges are ok for me). So how does Unity do in terms of performance with:
sewn UVs (no separate islands, think 1 mesh = 1 UV island
no sewn UVs (this each face = 1 UV rect), eg 1 Mesh, 1000 UVs.