Sorry Luce-Eric, I have to disagree with this, and I find your examples defeat your own argument. I have had years to develop muscle memory in Maya, and I'm comfortable nearly anywhere in the software, at least everywhere I might need to be, and it's still very frequently an uphill struggle.
Maya is hugely inconsistent, especially in the views you mention, compared to Softimage. You can get to decent operational speed in Maya, but a double digit number of years in I still have to write a script for something at least once a week... when it can be written at all. The main problem is twofold. The first part is that Maya absolutely requires you become a power user with an intimate understanding of the choices and modes of operation to be fluid when working. There is no hints to shortcuts, the shortcut editor is a mess, A LOT of absolutely key day one stuff is simply not available in the interface (if you don't watch a tutorial you will never find you need insert and x,c,v on a constant basis), and in general it actively discourages exploration by being punishing of any single mistake. Comparatively speaking Soft is a lot more in your face and immediate. Even if you don't know the software you can usually bumble your way around into finding what you need and first develop knowledge of what's available, and then developing muscle memory through simple repetition. The second part is developing muscle memory itself. You're a UI guy, I'm sure you've read your literature on user experience, learning patterns, conditioning and so on. XSI will generally confront you with about four or five key interaction models, and it hardly ever excepts them. Everything is a sticky key, every menu unfolds and works the same way, every panel toggles and offers options the same way and has functionality aggregated nearby that is generally understandable and correlated by similar rules. Conversely, Maya requires constant exceptions to learning. Altering interaction, which should all be part of the same learning group, is inconsistent. Some modifiers are sticky. Snapping is semi-sticky, as in it sticks only if you enter snapping before you draw/drag, whereas some things are completely non sticky, such as moving a pivot. Menus are generally click through, unless you access them from the hotbox, in which case they are, uselessly, hold-to-traverse. I could write you a long list, but my point is that while I do find people being excessively contrary and biased, but can't blame them for it given the situation, lets not pretend Maya's user experience is comparable but different: it simply isn't, and there's work to do. Hopefully H-Maya will go part or all the way to address it, but there are some very, very fundamental issues that worked their way backwards into the actual functional guts of Maya coming from its extremely poor, inconsistent, frustratingly fragmented and arbitrary interaction model. The GUI itself is probably not even worth discussing in depth. I mean, no arbitrary viewport arrangement after 16 years? F'in Seriously? And if you want me to use the stupid buttons on the left you're not even providing one with the left view vertical and a horizontal split on the right? Only the opposite. Come on, Luc, get on it and fix that shit already :p You did infinitely better work than this on XSI, bring it to Maya if you want people to use and don't be dismissive of people's opinions by saying you can only compare power-user experiences (beside the fact a Soft Power User will run circles around a Maya one in nearly any task when it comes to interaction). On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 1:45 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected]>wrote: > None of these products are for newbies; we spent years learning Softimage. > Sounds like you wanted to edit a history node, doing a procedural > modification. You'd open the node editor or try the input section of the > channel box. This is a first days stuff. We would probably not have had a > render tree in XSI if we had focused on simplicity over power. And > certainly not Ice. God you have to guess node name and search for them, are > you kidding me. Even with classic simulation it's not always obvious to > know what to select and when to call menu. There is all sort of stuff we > just learn - the measure of usability is how well you can do more complex > stuff once you know the basics > >
