Maya/Photoshop Scale

[ShaggyBeans]

There is one fundamental that has always been foggy for me and I know it is holding me back. And that is scale. I've read a lot of creative books and can't seem to find enough on the subject. It might be my lack of experience but when I begin creating a scene in Maya I can never determine what form of scale I should use. How that relates to Photoshop and game engines.

How should I customize my grid so it matches a grid in PS? or even a game engine?
Does anyone know of a great resource or have tips that could help me master this concept?

I get the resolution of an object confused with it's scale. I hope this makes sense.

Any advise would be very much appreciated.
:think:

[micke]

From my experience I'll say it all depends.
Just decide a scale and follow that consistently. Preferably you should set up your scene so that 1 unit is either 1 cm or 1 m to make things easier.

If you are using a specific engine there's probably documents about what scale it uses. and you can always scale things afterwards, or in the game engine.

[Vailias]

well first question would be, why are you trying to tie photoshop scale and 3d program scale together anyway?
Unless you are doing tiling textures you're not going to have a direct planar relationship anyway. Even then you're not going to match photoshop resolution inches or cm to asset cm, as you'd need gig's of texture data for a single model. Most of the time with textures you're just looking to keep a fairly even texel distribution (texel = textured pixel. Ie each pixel in the texture map should occupy about the same amount of area on the model), but certainly not anything like print resolution.

Scale is important, but less so than proportion. So long as you build your model in proper proportion, you can scale it up or down to the proper in engine size, either before or after getting it into the engine.

Scale becomes important during the import process, as some engines have a limited accuracy in placing the imported vertices. Unreal 2.x, for example, had I think a 1/8uu accuracy, so if your model had two verts within 0.125 units of each other, they would likely occupy the same space. Whatever engine you use, its tools should have some sort of documentation regarding what the working units are for its importers. Again unreal as an example, the default unit conversion was one CM in maya = 1 Unreal Unit.

The other important part of scale is if you are working on a team. Building your props with a grid set to meters, while others have theirs in inches, or cm can create extra work getting everything to line up at the right size. This is more a concern for non game assets though, as that middle process of getting things into the game engine tends to get them all scaled properly too. (or rather the person in charge of game asset management)

Scale vs Resolution

Scale = how relatively large the model is
resolution = how detailed its geometry is.

err, so were you asking about resolution or scale then?

[ShaggyBeans]

Thanks for the reply and input. I guess a more specific question I should start with is under the Channel Box you'll find INPUTS for a selected object, let's say a cube, there you'll find Input values for Dimensions. Does an objects Dimension correlate with the Grid Units? Assuming a grid unit=1 cm, if I change the dimensions to 5x5x5 the cube is 5 cm. However, this is the part where I get confused, If I scale the cube up or down the scale changes but not the dimensions. A 5x5x5cm cube is still a 5x5x5cm cube no matter how big or small i make it. But now it's on a grid that is based on 1 unit=1 cm and my 5 cm cube is taking up 20 units on the grid.

I related Maya to PS because I was creating a grid in PS based on the dimensions of the geometry I created in Maya. Example: I create a plane in maya, 1024x512, so I created a grid in PS with the same dimensions for my texture so it would transfer nicely. When I created the plane is was pretty large in my maya scene so I scaled it down. However it retained it's dimensions. So although it's 1024x512 it's small enough to be inside the Grid area..... and my texture fits perfectly.... so that's how I was getting scale and resolution confused. I was relating the dimensions of an object to maya units meanwhile relating it to texture resolution.

I hope that makes sense, heh, in any case thanks for the feedback.