Hello Raffaele:
As an aside, I would like to plug Daniel S. Lima's Sculpt InBetween
Editor as an alternative to Rabbit Shapes for managing your corrective
shapes in Maya...when you have time to try it, anyway:
http://danielslima.com/sculpt-inbetween-editor-1-0/
It's free, too! And offers almost entirely the same functionality,
albeit in a different UI :)
Yours sincerely,
Siew Yi Liang
On 3/7/2014 11:50 AM, Raffaele Fragapane wrote:
I think the core issue here isn't as much whether Maya can be patched
or not, it surely can, the core is still functional and respectably
open, if not without issues (and stability has been degrading compared
to the past IME).
The problem for a lot of people used to Soft is how much scavenging
and patching they will HAVE TO do before they are even remotely close
to having previous functionality.
For the small scale Maya user, so leave us engineers and big shops
out, having to scavenge for scripts and tools and hacking together
horrible copy'n'paste MEL macros is part of the day to day routine,
even for things such as opening more than one outliner. That's why
it's perceived as inferior by a lot of Soft users.
We can discuss potential all day, and there are certainly things I can
do in Maya that Soft will simply not allow me to do, but in terms of
OOTB experience it is pretty F'in disgraceful with all the missing bits.
Rabbit's Shapes plugin and ngSkinTools are bare minimum additions to
even be able to use it, along side a handful of shelves (Maya's layout
is another disgrace that requires a lot of old school hacking) that
you'll have to scavenge from all over the place.
You also have to toe the line between what you can rely on and what
you can't.
Maya has a binary lock on versions, so any new major release, and in
two recorded cases even the .5s, it breaks binary compatibility.
Soft users take for granted that most C++ plugins and nodes written
four years ago and never touched again will still work. There was some
pretty major upset when for the first time a version or two ago some
ICE fixes "broke" the majority of nodes into requiring recompilation.
This is par for the course in Maya, compiled anything will NOT work on
any major version other than the one it was compiled for.
On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 6:36 AM, Meng-Yang Lu <ntmon...@gmail.com
<mailto:ntmon...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I've always felt Maya's core performance has been relatively good
compared to others. It is incredibly extensible and can maintain
some really good performance. The problem that Maya has is having
the various components exchange data between each other.
Essentially, every node in the scene is holding each other's hand
always. These no easy way to hold up data to prevent all the
nodes from updating when you make a change.
It boils down to how cleanly you can implement these features.
There are some legacy things that could go, obviously some
complete reworks, but development for Maya is a lot more straight
forward than Softimage.
My only gripe is that as you build tools for Maya, the plug-in
manager gets incredibly messy. Looks like a vomit of ideas over
the past 10 years and no search function. And it kinda needs all
this garbage to function.
House cleaning is definitely in order.
-Lu
