Thanks for speaking up, Laurence. I'm sure your intentions are good, and the effort is appreciated. We are however, very upset with your bosses' decision-making and how it has played out so far. Please don't take it personally. It is rather a bitter pill that you guys are only speaking to us now about this.
Lighting and rendering has been my area of specialization for nearly 20 years of Softimage use and a bit less than 3 years in Maya. I would very much like to participate in any discussion you'd like to have about possible improvements to Maya's L&R workflow, as I am clearly going to have to deal with it more and more. The primary issue to me, other than render layers simply breaking for mysterious reasons (a complaint I hear far often from Maya-only artists than my limited Maya experience would have suggested to me), is the workflow and organizational overhead required of the user. For example: if I want to make a pass in which, say, primary visibility is turned off for a variety of objects, regardless of their parenting, in Softimage the workflow is: 1. make new pass (1 click) 2. select n objects (some # of clicks, possibly some rectangle drags, worst case is n clicks) 3. put them in a partition (1 click) 4. put a visibility property onto the partition (one middle-click drag&drop) 5. open the visibility property, uncheck primary ray visibility (2 clicks) A total of 6 to (n+5) clicks, with the range heavily biased toward the low end. In Maya, the workflow as I've learned it would be more like: 1. select everything (probably one click, maybe with a rectangle drag, or one hotkey combination) 2. make a new render layer (1 click) 3. select object #1 (1 click) 4. go to the attribute editor, select the render stats rollout, right-click to make a layer override, uncheck primary ray visibility (3 clicks minimum) 5. repeat steps 3 & 4 (n-1) times A total of 2 + (n*4) clicks. For any number of objects over 1 (!) the Softimage workflow is much easier and faster. More importantly, by simply looking at the partition contents in an explorer view (another thing that would be good to have in Maya), I can see at a glance which objects have had their visibility overridden. Is there even a way to do this in Maya? Maybe I could do this through the spreadsheet (which I only just heard about)? Can I do the overrides that way, for that matter? I guess that would moot the above comparison of clicks, but it suggests other issues. For example, if I'm taking over someone else's work, or even revisiting my own from months or years earlier, in Soft I can look at the passes, wonder, "hmmm, what's this partition here for?" and open it up to see instantly that it's a primary ray visibility override. If the spreadsheet is the only place in Maya where the information can be sifted and represented globally for all of the scene, I'd have to know what I was looking for or do an exhaustive number of queries and sorts. Now, I imagine there's a script to help with this. Assuming there is, I guess I could find it somewhere online, download it, turn it into a button, and stick it on a toolshelf somewhere. The thing is, the workflow is RIDDLED with these "little things." And I freelance. I would have to compile and maintain a substantial library of scripts and plug-ins, and be able to install them every time I sit down to a new desktop environment, right? This, in order to do nothing special at all, just reduce the time-suckage and annoyance factor. So, by all means, let's continue the discussion! Ed Manning
