I rigged on quite a few characters in Maya at Blue Sky Studios and now
(Softimage) AnimSchool. We offer the well-known "Malcolm" rig for free.
There is no comparison to rigging in Softimage and Maya--not the kind of
rigging I do. I often assume by now they have better workflows in Maya,
but I'm often surprised to find how convoluted and limiting the
workflows are to this day. Most Maya people must not know there are
better ways of working or aren't doing the kinds of things I am, because
the difference is profound.
-At any point in the rigging process, you can make edits in the model
stack to change the shape and topology of the model. After
experimenting, you can freeze that part of the stack and continue on
with that new shape, retaining almost every bit of work you've done.
YOU CAN CHANGE THE TOPOLOGY. YOU CAN CHANGE THE SHAPE FREELY.
This difference is huge. You can work toward completion without fear of
losing work. You can experiment freely--knowing it's fine if you want to
make a major change. I'm never afraid of losing blendshape work.
And if the changes are really significant, you can always Gator you're
way out of a jam.
-You can do blendshape edits directly on the geometry, modelessly,
instead of on a separate blendshape object.
-There is no comparison with corrective blendshapes. In Softimage, you
go to Secondary Shape mode and drag a few points.
In Maya, I wish you luck. You can install one of several plug-ins and
scripts and HOPE that it works. If the scenario is simple enough, it might.
Several people here tried to help a student make a single corrective
blendshape on an elbow -- and we're all experienced Maya riggers. After
hours of attempting, we threw up our hands. There was something in that
object's history that was making the blendshape plug-in fail. The answer
is what it often is: just start over.
-EDITING corrective blendshapes. In Maya, heaven help you if you want to
edit that blendshape later. Start the process again and make a new one.
In Softimage, drag a few points and you're done in seconds.
-For facial work, being able to make face shapes in conjunction with the
mixer, working directly on the main geo. To see other shapes muted,
soloed as you're working. This allows you to craft shapes that work for
different scenarios, with just the right falloff. You can make
correctives for shape combinations quickly. In face work, it's all about
how the functions combine to make the range of expressive results.
-The envelope weighting is far superior. The smoothing is just better,
and more reliable. Negative weight painting actually works.
Being able to make sophisticated weighting allows you to make lighter
rigs, because fewer nodes and calculations are needed.
I can't believe someone actually compared Maya's Component Editor to
Softimage's Weight Editor. I'm stunned.
Sometimes, demoing Maya's envelope weighting, it just stops working for
no reason -- I have no idea why. (Mind you, I've been rigging in Maya
since 1999.)
-You can envelope/skin null objects, not just joints. (Yes, Maya will
let you add other objects as deformers but it is limiting and causes
problems.)
-The tweak tool. You can grab anywhere and it will just get the nearest
point/edge/poly and transform it precisely. Add the proportional editing
and it's very sculptural without giving up precise transform control. I
far prefer this workflow to the Zbrush approach geared toward paintstrokes.
-In Softimage, you can change the wireframe on shaded opacity. You can
change the point sizes. These mean I can visualize and work with the
shape, not get visually stuck on the tech clutter like in Maya.
-LinkWithOrientation. Does Maya have anything built-in yet? I know there
are pose readers out there, but they are slow and 3rd party.
-The "smooth preview" Geometry Approximation is better, faster, and more
stable in Softimage.
-Even with the army of tools and plug-ins we had at Blue Sky Studios, I
would still much rather use off-the-shelf Softimage.
-You can select controls without selecting (and highlighting) all its
children. This makes it easier to animate the rig -- just drag selecting
will get you the selectable controls. In Maya, drag-selecting gets a
mixture of heirarchy parts.
All this means that I can focus on the ART, the shaping of the rig, not
jump through hoops all day.
As a result, our characters are more flexible and expressive.
On 1/8/2014 2:30 AM, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
To be fair, I weighted a fair amount of characters in Maya over the
years but I never experienced anything like that.
When exactly is this happening? The only hickup I ran into
occasionally was when painting weights, and then undoing that
operation, which in rare cases does what you describe, but I think
they fixed that in version 2013 or 2014. I never locked the skin
weights, workflow wise I always found that highly disruptive.
I was quite shocked to learn from riggers in my last job, that in
maya you have to "lock all bones but the ones you want to weight
to via small tick boxes" failure to do so aparently causing maya
to through random influences around...
On 8 January 2014 02:22, Alan Fregtman <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Last time I had to use Maya I would use Crosswalk to transfer
the skinned mesh from Maya to Soft, do my weighting in home
sweet home, then I wrote an exporter that saved out my weights
in the "/cometSaveWeights/" format. Life saver!
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Steven Caron <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
arg, figured it out.
import pymel.core as pm
pm.select(pm.skinCluster(pm.selected()[0], query=True,
influence=True))
best UI ever!
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Steven Caron
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
this thread is some what well timed... i am in maya
right now. i need to get a mesh and its skin/envelope
into softimage. i did not rig this object and i don't
know enough about maya to try and understand it
through inspection. in softimage i would select the
mesh, then select the deformers from envelope, then
key frame those objects and remove the constraints on
them in mass with 'remove all constraints'
is NONE of that doable in maya? cause i am having a
hell of a time figuring it out.
s
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Stefan Kubicek
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