To be fair, I wish Soft had the same "loops that don't make sense". Maya nodes are able to inspect and express the scene graph to a much higher extent than it's ever been possible in Soft.
Things like the parent inverse transform being able to feed back into a node affecting the owner of that attribute are shortcuts, and convenient ones at that. Introspection and outwards inspection from nodes have always been considerably ahead of Soft's historically painfully limited operators. It's a massive mistake to confuse the NE with ICE. They serve completely different purposes past the superficial and cosmetic similarities, and are good at completely different things. Maya isn't really stupid, counter-intuitive or useless in those regards, neither it is destructive. What Maya's issue is, by and large, is how F'ing poor the toolkit out of the box is. You have a ton of tiny, overly complicated minutiae to deal with that requires you develop knowledge and memory of ridiculously convoluted processes that are at odds with how the software operates, and you have a solid (if aging) and extensive platform when it comes to scene handling. It completely misses everything inbetween, so if you can't fill that gap (and on average commercial plugins and free scripts do a piss poor job of it) yourself, you're up a creek without a paddle and a tidal wave coming your way. This is in the context of the scene graph. When it comes to proceduralism of a certain type, higher level management of the scene and so on, Maya is a barren wasteland where blood thirsty rapists and serial killers roam free. You need to build a lot of stuff, a lot of it to an extremely low level, to make it barely passable (passes anyone?) On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Gerbrand Nel <nagv...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think my main problem with the node editor is that some things that > are influencing each other, aren't connected in the node editor. Other > things are connected in a loop. > This makes no sense to us humans. > I was hoping the node editor would fill the gap left by the lack of a > proper operator stack, but it still blows my mind how destructive Maya's > work flow is. > For now the node editor is where I do my shading, and check to see if my > deformers are still linked when things don't seem to work right. > > OH here is a fun thing to try: put some animation on a sphere. Then graph > that in the editor, and add animation layers. My nose almost started > bleeding :) > > G > >
