--- I really suck at the technical side of rigging, which is why I never get to the point of showing my own characters in motion and I would welcome anything hat helps me get closer to such a point. From that biased view, I think all the 3D DCC apps suck in the way they let you create control over a mesh and animate it.
project pinochio from autodesk is really cool because it provides top notch wheighted meshes with a rig that fits the human ik Maya way of suggesting control. That said, when you just take it and go and animate that in Maya, Human Ik may jump around and gives you a middle finger the moment you scrub the timeline, simply because there´s IK and FK and the pose you set may not have been the pose you keyed because there may have been constraint/rig blend presets you may need to adjust first. For me, that´s typical Maya. Still, I am happy there is project pinochio and at least such rigs to learn from. Rigging is so complicated, it´s become a very specialised field but that shouldn´t be the excuse to not go there and see if there´s a way to improve things for everyone... ---- This is for Matt Lind: In Maya 2008, I had to animate a super special fleece of a new and improved sanitary pad in a tight deadline with an Agency girl present. It´s a similar scenario, you want nice, believable motions but have to hit keyposes and keyframes exactly, the whole shot was some 76 frames. I´m not an Animator and was a Junior at that company but had a trusting Lead and we decided we would risk using a rigged cloth sim, I think it was the first incarnation of nCloth in Maya. On top we had the option to impose blendshapes and use cached frames to blend into or out of. I struggled a lot with the tools and that job but would still resort to a similar approach, maybe looking for simplification and improvements. Regarding cloth for games, you probably know the nVidia toolkit (for udk) for Maya. It´s really nice but runtime sim. I would prefer a vertex cache, just because I don´t want *surprise*. In terms of simulation, I´m looking into the UDK versus the CRYENGINE way of creating and storing animation data, CRYENGINE has the character translate around, UDK is expecting the pedestal. Not easy to come up with a solution that works for both. Out of naivity (in terms of animation and rigging) I would think restricting the character´s world space translation to the top node for animation and preview and then "just ignore/freeze/mute/delete" those keys might work for cache/bake/export. I´m stupid and romantically optimistic, I know. Cheers, tim On 06.01.2014 23:52, Matt Lind wrote:
Arguments are good. That’s where the truth comes out from having to prove a point one way or another. We need to do simulation too, but mostly for clothing or tapestries. The hard part for us is getting the motion to look natural and meaningful, but also loop seamlessly over a short duration and blend with other actions doing the same. Example: Our main avatar has over 700 unique actions (walk, run, jump, roll left, roll right, die, etc…). The longest action I can find is about 200 frames long and the average case about 45-60 frames (animating at 30 fps). If a piece of cloth is animated, it needs to start and end in the same position for all actions that move that cloth because any action can transition into almost any other action at runtime. The hard part is finding cloth poses that look natural and flow nicely in those transitions while being able to loop without looking stupid. Another difficult part is getting the cloth to animate correctly because all the avatar performs his actions in place a the world origin on a pedastal. He doesn’t travel around as seen in the runtime environment. So far we’ve been doing it all manually via keying the envelope deformers. Matt *From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Meng-Yang Lu *Sent:* Monday, January 06, 2014 2:27 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* Re: rigging in xsi vs maya What does XSI users use for skin simulation these days? All custom stuff in ICE? We've been leveraging nCloth quite a bit lately and arguably, it's the only piece of tech that 3D peeps here regardless of app preference can unanimously agree that it is indeed pretty good. Maybe not significant for games, but plays a big part of what we do day to day. The other thing is speed. This is subjective, but not without me observing over the years that if you get rigs of similar complexity, however you get there, animating a handful in Maya is usually no problem while doing the same in XSI feels a bit slow. Not trying to argue, Matt. If forced to pick A or B, I'd find a way regardless. Just trying to be objective and see what bounces back because we're always looking for faster and better ways of doing stuff. -Lu On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 2:03 PM, Matt Lind <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: So what does maya rigging tools have that Softimage doesn’t that makes a significant difference at the end of the day? Matt *From:*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Steven Caron *Sent:* Monday, January 06, 2014 1:58 PM *To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> *Subject:* Re: rigging in xsi vs maya of course everyone would do this, which is why it seems silly to attempt and quantify it at all. i know i have bias and i know trained maya talent do too... i love to squabble about this stuff in my work environment but it is half fun these days. i know there are issues on both sides... but i am not going to post a blog dedicated to it. On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: everyone would do this, imho, everyone has their thing they like here or there. About the IK chains in Softimage, when all you did in 10 years is rig like Softimage, it's second nature and you accept the way it works as how things work (with nulls, etc) I think the discussion in general is deep and interesting, although those first 3 paragraphs seem way too harsh. I've read some of these comments from client reports.
