Le mercredi 8 janvier 2014, David Gallagher a écrit :
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.
Ith
-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]> 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]> 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]> 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'
