And all of that doesn't mean much to artist when still after decades of existence all that power wasn't used to provide streamlined and organised workflow and tool that simply do its job without pulling hair, rising blood pressure and shortening life by significant amount
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 1:33 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <[email protected]> wrote: > The definition of the word Open will just morph again until it fits > whatever argument needs to be win. The opinion that Open necessarily > means open source is a neologism. > > There isn't just an API that matches 1:1 internals, the Maya UI is > defined directly in MEL and it ships with 4 millions lines of source > code in mel and python, distributed in 25,000 MEL and 4000 pythons > files. This isn't just about being able to write plug-ins, back in > 1990s it was a whole different approach to writing software. > > > On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Raffaele Fragapane > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Talk about semantics escalating :) > > > > The word open is like saying professional grade, or robust, or a number > of > > other things that are used because, in context, they fit. > > > > Maya offered more and sooner than everybody else things like listeners, a > > robust socket insertion point, an entry point into the main loop and > control > > over things like it's main event loop sleep, process priority, exposed > the > > graph to a fairly granular level, and offered early on what 16 years ago > was > > a fairly modern dev model for all kind of nodes in a fashion similar to > what > > the developers themselves would have access to. > > > > That gap has closed considerably, and in some cases Maya has been > surpassed > > in "open-ness", or at least in what you can comfortably do (viewport > work in > > Maya is a gigantic pain in the arse in example for certain things, and > > contexts are weak, but that's architectural, not blackboxing), but all in > > all, if you decide to be objective rather than argumentative about it, > it is > > the one DCC app out there with the most of its guts exposed to the open > air. > > > > Softimage had made it to a close second and here and there even surpassed > > it, and in general while less "open", as things tend to be better > organized > > but abstracted away from the guts, also a helluva lot more pleasurable to > > work with (at least on windows). Houdini is a well known disgrace with > the > > Boost dependencies and with the HDK being largely uncharted and > unexploited, > > and the wrappers for it being more recent and not much better than a > > reshuffle. > > Max is single platform and incomprehensible to humans, and the rest of > the > > apps out there barely cover half the stretch of tasks Maya, Soft and > Houdini > > can tackle. > > > > All in all, while at (frequent) times being just as pleasant as dipping > your > > balls in hot tar, Maya is the more "open" of the lot and has been for a > > while, because the abstractions are very thin, and access has massive > > surface with a lot of entry points. > > > > For what most people think of when the word open it's used in context it > can > > lay an honest claim to being "very open". > > It can't quite say it's intuitive, or pleasant, or well organized, or > even > > fully featured in some regards, and it's the single most painful software > > out there to do prototyping work in for a lot of stuff, but it certainly > > isn't "closed". >
