Hi Luc-Eric, Hi Graham,
can you guys talk with the Maya UI group about a better way to incorporate Duncan Brinsmead´s parameter options? I know, the alternative Houdini way of having to pipe together everything over and over yourself and ideally mentally debugging the graph even before placing any node at all isn´t ideal either but just poking around the ICE node editor without knowing all the nodes is so rewarding because of the feedback it gives you while learning your way around the nodes and compounds. Compared to that, simply rotating Maya particles nice still needs the same pre y2k script... ### Comparing Softimage and Maya features of the last couple of years, I find the following (unsorted) list shows some of the steps that led to gaining functionality: *Gator (Softimage Attribute Transfer) *Motor (Softimage prior/competitor to Motionbuilder) *Rendermapping (Maya/Softimage, mR functionality) *paint fx (Maya) *reworked Maya dynamics - the nucleus solver framework *Maya fluids, shading particles as fluids and actually rendering fluids *Softimage ICE, still lacking a fluid (smoke) solver and render options *Softimage FaceRobot *Renderlayers, Passes, Partitions, Groups, overrides (Softimage/Maya) *Trax (Maya) *Animation Mixer (Softimage) *The RenderRegion (Softimage) *ICE´s CrowdFx (Softimage) Last but not least: "The Send to ..." button (Overly) simplifying the above, it´s all plug-ins to extend an existing tool. Personally, I like the Softimage way for Modeling, Lighting, Shading and Rendering better but wonder why Rendering and Lighting doesn´t evolve much anymore? There´s lot´s of buzz about viewport 2.0, I´d prefer to just render A+++ or wysiwyg. exactly. Not almost or nice as well. exactly. Maybe a bit less fine AA. But not something completely different... ### In terms of scalability, I can´t say how much I am feed up with Polygons, Triangles and pulling vertices. I wonder why nobody looks into getting rid of that crappy approximation of a surface and looks into describing things better than by a flat tri a normal and a voodoo uhuhu smoothing angle? Class A surfaces. Gazillions of them, smoothly animated and playing back on screen. Going from close-up to total shot without a burp. Voxels. NicNacs. Whatever. As long as there is a Send to button to and from ZBrush/3D coat. That would be something. You can pack it into Alembic if you like. As long as I can read it in 10 years, that´s fine with me. Cheers, tim .
