Maya for Games?
 

I am a Advanced Beginner in Maya. So long I have onlyt created stuff and animated, textured and so on (to make movies). But how are you supposed to progress when creating for example a game world for a game (or just objects for the world)?. How are you supposed to set up settings and rendering etc? Is there any restrictions of what you can do (or does that depend on the game engine), and after creating the world, do you need any other software package or something to prepare it for use in a game engine?

Thanks/ Robin

Maya's settings and rendering means very little when making models for real time. Although there are lots of polygon optimizations & texture tricks that apply across the board, how you prepare your models is very engine specific. Most game companies have their own Maya exporters that convert Maya scenes into formats compatible with their game engine. Real time renderers that let you see what your world will look like in-game are often integrated into maya. Allot of game engines also accept some of the generic files that maya can export (for instance, .obj), but to get them to look good in-game often requires some additional setting up / programming of the engine.

There are many many restrictions for what you can do. Most of Maya's features will not be supported in game engines. At a bare minimum, models, single layer diffuse textures, and basic light settings are compatible, beyond that its engine & file format specific.

rep:
 

Thanks.

So the best way is to learn all aspects of Maya and then you can start checking different game engines etc. to see what features they support etc?

/Robin

Yeah, pretty much, but try to find something on game optimization, because some optimizations aren't so obvious and its best to learn modeling using certain good practices from the start. Instancing, LOD, vertex chaining, whats an illegal/non manifold faces, modeling primarily with quads, are things you might want to look up to start with.

Maya itself is not a game engine and cannot, by itself, be used to create games. It can be used to create game *art* but not the games that can be actually played.

Like was mentioned, there are other tools used, most of them proprietary, to export art from Maya to be placed within a working game engine.