I've worked with Maya since alpha versions and I was also on the board of advisors for Sumatra, although I didn't use XSI until a few years later. I cut my teeth on VAX, TDI Explore, Wavefront and Soft 3D. I'm very familiar with proprietary software and in-house tools at large studios. I now spend some of my time teaching 3D computer animation through Maya at university.
We had a tough time with the decisions that Maya developers made during it's alpha development. We drew their attention to the 180-axis-flipping of drawn bones to them immediately but they refused to change it because they didn't consider it broken as it was "just the way the algorithm works". It had nothing to do with usability. Still to this day, users still write scripts to get around this shortcoming. On the other hand, the Maya devs jumped through hoops to re-create splineIK, a method I designed and implemented in Soft 3D. Personally, I'd prefer a stable set of small tools that work consistently, than a lot of 'powerful' tools that are only half implemented. Viewing it through this particular lens, I believe Maya was written with the computer in mind and not the user. Luc Eric has suggested that parenting and constraint selection makes sense and I do see his point of view. However, Maya at it's core, feels like it was written with a terse a syntax as unix's 'dc' (desk calculator). i.e. in reverse polish notation instead of the more human readable infix notation. 1) Reverse Polish Notation: > 1 1 + = 2 > value value operator > select select command 2) Infix Notation: > 1 + 1 = 2 > value operator value > select command select Watching the development of Maya over the next few years, the developers definitely had XSI in their rear view mirror. They tried to implement features from XSI into Maya. However, this was done extremely poorly and resulted in a tick box exercise. One result of this has been Trax. Trax's core issue is that it maps nodes to indices. i.e. it's version of Actions, Clips, isn't name-based but it's based on order of initial selection. So, it works immediately in a demo but doesn't in production when rigs are evolving. The work around for this is a lot of scripts... scripts to record and store selections and selection order. Scripts to rebuild clips, scripts to rebuild timelines etc. Trax, eventually went in for an overhaul and we were looking forward to it becoming a useful tool but alas it's core issue was never tackled and it remains under utilised. But more importantly, Maya users have never been exposed to a really great tool that actually works. They now all assume non-linear editing is a broken toy. Until, Maya devs focus on human usability, Maya will always be a struggle for a lot of users. -- *Greg Maguire* | Inlifesize Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739 [email protected] | www.inlifesize.com
