IMHO the article denotes a guy that simply was overwhelmed with SI and was frightened by his own paradigm.
Of course I have also my own paradigm and the few times before these SI AD doomsdays that I tried Maya, never could be inside of it for more than 30 minutes to figure out its phylosophy starting from something as simple as its UI. About two years ago, I went into Animschool because characters have always been my passion, and being in the advertising business for so long haven´t had the chance to really work on characters. All the classes are in Maya with top rated teachers from different big featured studios. So I had no other option to get into Maya to do the rigging assignments (modeling I could work in Softimage and export to Maya for reviews and evaluation). So here is my experience with Maya rigging. 1.Envelope Rig. Layout the bones and align the axis. Draw, group, constrain direction, change up vector, check your axis, parent, unparent, etc. Create ribbons, with hair, go to the hyerarchy view, delete the hair, keep the folicle, create the nulls, attach..... better create a script to create the ribbons, script this, script that. To get the envelope rip. I watched this first process in Maya and sorry but Softimage beats Maya by far. 2. Weighting Inside out method. Great Concept to get a solid base for weighting. Watch out, even with normalize option some strange things happen. If you are not careful and methodic locking and unlocking joints you can easily screw up all the thing. The weight editor is not very reliable.... For me Softimage also beats Maya on this one. 3. Control Rig. Not that much to say... Constrains, color blend nodes, whatever. define IK chain an additional step??? For some odd reason I was getting discrepancies between the positions of the IK chain and the FK chain, more math nodes related to color to do the operations, make sure inside the math node the kind of operation it will execute. The hypergraph cluttered with connections and more connections... Well IMHO it is a mess under the hood. Switch between the hyerarchy, outliner, hypershade to find the constrain that is not working... Ok finally, in that mayhem I had the full rig. 4 Time for the corrective shapes..... Pose the limb, duplicate, freeze, sculpt the corrective, find a script to get back the original from the corrected and interpolate to have the delta to add for the blendshape node... WHAAAAT???? No secondary shape mode???? Ohh and never, ever delete the source for the blendshape, because if you make a mistake to remove that blendshape from the blendshape node well, maybe some Maya guru here but was impossible for me, unless I rebuild the blendshape node from scratch again.... Mirror the corrective... There is no straight way at least in Maya 2013 to mirror a corrective unless of course you have a magic script to do so..... Sorry but Softimage in this particular case, knocks out Maya by far out of the box. 5. Set driven keys for triggering the blendshapes. Ok no big deal different way to do it, more math nodes in the hypershade.... I haven't used Maya 2014 yet but they say that made some improvements to the node editor and now is a better option to do the connections. But the graph editor if you have not used Softimage is really a crap. I had never before struggled so much with the tangents and its handles.... Not even in Illustrator. After delivering my final project. I went back to softimage and rigged the character the same way in less than half the time with improvements in the rig. Sorry maybe the "Industry Standard" has other benefits above Softimage. I don't know what they are except that it is "easier to get a job" and it has a nice viewport.... The guy that wrote that article maybe was rigging a cylinder and a sphere.... 2014/1/6 Tim Leydecker <[email protected]> > --- > > 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:softimage-bounces@ >> listproc.autodesk.com] *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:softimage-bounces@ >> listproc.autodesk.com> [mailto:[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Steven >> Caron >> *Sent:* Monday, January 06, 2014 1:58 PM >> >> >> *To:* [email protected] <mailto:softimage@listproc. >> autodesk.com> >> *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. >> >>
