Hi Alastair, Nice to see you found your way to this list. There's been a lot of doom and gloom on the XSI list since the EOL news but unfortunately a lot of the vitriol towards Maya's shortcomings is dishonest, misguided or at best uninformed.
Before I get into specifics I wanted to give a bit of background. I'm a long time XSI user, it was my first software some 10 years ago and got to work pretty closely with Softimage while I was in Montreal. That said over the span of my career I've used 3ds max and Maya extensively as the main DCC and now I'm in a 100% proprietary environment, so I feel like I have a good overview of the good, bad and ugly side of software... I was very skeptical about transitioning to Maya from XSI and there are things that take getting use to and naturally there were things I really missed in no particular order: 1. Property Pages Maya has a robust attribute editor but its very much tied to selection. There was something nice about the on-demand nature of the property pages workflow. 2. Expressions Maya's expressions and the workflow associated with them is dirt poor compared to XSI. That being said, expressions in XSI are much needed to account for lack of a high level DG graph accessible to users. 3. Weight Painting While Maya has done some work to improve this workflow it still lags behind XSI. Specifically XSI's weight normalization and smoothing algorithms perform much better. As I was mainly doing character work when I first switched to Maya this was no doubt the biggest pain I had to deal with. 4. Groups Similar to Maya's Sets but as usual the workflow feels much better in XSI. It's such a small feature but I did miss it a lot. 5. Render Passes XSI has workflow down pretty well and I think it is superior to Maya 6. SCOPs Writing in-scene operators was a huge advantage in character setup in XSI and a great way to deal with complex problems. 7. ICE Clearly most elegant visual interface to date and the provided collection of operators is a great starting point. 8. OOP Scripting SDK After using XSI SDK it was difficult to accept the command nature of Maya Python (prior to PyMel or other custom OPP wrappers) 9. Modeling Until the last release of Maya, its modeling tools lagged behind XSI a fair bit, this is less of an issue now if not at all. 10. Bones XSI skeleton bones provide a really straight forward workflow for building rigs with a lot of complexity abstracted from the user. It takes quite a bit more steps and a more thorough understanding of what you are doing to achieve the same in Maya. However, a lot of the abstraction in XSI has come back to bite me in the end when trying to modify the behavior in significant ways. That said however, Maya does have it's advantages and you can build an very powerful and scalable pipeline with it as your main DCC, although it will take some time and expenditure on your end. First, Maya is built around a DG that is directly accessible to the users. In essence your whole application is an ICE graph which opens it up to a lot of possibilities. There are several examples of how Maya could be extended to take advantage of it, while many are in-house solutions you can take a look at http://www.soup-dev.com/ as an example of what is possible. In addition, the more generic nature of Maya's attribute types gives it greater flexibility than ICE in some regards. The biggest thing missing is a robust compound encapsulation mechanism (containers don't even come close). Then there's the scripting and API. It might not be pretty but it is much more comprehensive and robust when compared to XSI. The native Qt integration is also nothing to sneeze at. With Maya I have been able to develop tools with greater freedom to achieve the workflow that is required by artists, while I did feel boxed in to a corner quite a few times within XSI. Ultimately, you can make Maya do exactly what you want in the end and achieve quick turnaround time with a very decent workflow even though it might take some development. Hope this is useful. Feel free to ask any questions you might have, I'm happy to help. Cheers! On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:04 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello > > > My name is Alastair Hearsum. I'm head of 3d at Glassworks: > http://www.glassworks.co.uk/ > > We use Softimage and as you may have heard Autodesk is discontinuing it. > It has caused quite a furore amongst Softimage users , as you'd expect. I > have already canvassed opinion from the SI users about their views on what > they'll miss but I wanted to get a view from the "other side of the fence" > as it were. > > > The question is very specifically aimed at Maya users who have had > Softimage experience or work alongside colleagues who use SI. The question > is: > > > Do you have a view on what SI features you envy and wish you had in Maya. > If there are none then that is a valid answer. If you have some then please > list your top 5 and a very brief description of why. > > > For your information a summary of the Softimage users poll is: > > > Clean elegant efficient user interface and logical workflow: enabling us > to get things done quicker and with less pain. This so important and a > really fundamental part of the fabric of the software. > > ICE: its seamless powerful and all pervading presence; everything can > connect to and control everything else > > Render pass and partition system. It is absolutely robust and does all you > expect. Indespensible. > > Live operator stack and construction history. Its all alive all of the > time enabling highly complex layering of effects and processes > > Animation, modelling and rigging toolsets. They are peerless. > > > Thankyou > > > Alastair > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/d548a836-ee1b-4162-8086-9688d24b839b%40googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Programming for Autodesk Maya" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/python_inside_maya/CAPCVZ5NCipESFqqfFKWjF5NGFFjh5a5eb%3DKp5aMTuR9utqKu9g%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
