Re: parenting in Softimage vs. Maya.....confusion

[Jason S]

Here it is with formatting (easier to make-out) This is probably helpful for anyone transitioning from Softimage to Maya. ( by the way, never, ever ever ever, parent under objects like this, but he's making a point) https://vimeo.com/120223100 ".... never parent under objects like this"  because it causes some sort of problem in Maya[?]  (that i don't get?),  or because you just don't like it? Yes, it can cause problems in Maya. Often problems specific to rendering. It's been a while, but I think it involved material mixups or visibility mixups. It's fine to parent to things that aren't renderable, like groups, locators, even splines, though I'm not 100 percent on splines, as I usually use constraints in such a case. you can't parent one object to another? really?.....had no idea it can cause skewing on the objects under objects.. and yes, you can parent under objects, just don't parent the dag of shapes under the dag of other shapes. There is really no reason to parent a cube under another cube. i think us Softimage guys have a whole 'nother idea of what "parenting" is......do i understand this to mean that "don't parent constraint objects to one another",.....rather than "don't assemble them in a hierarchy"? essentially, "middle drag" vs "parent -r", etc yeah, parent -r -shape, is just to parent shapes,, middleDrag/"p"/parent is to parent transforms Its okay, but not usual to parent multiple shapes under one transform, and certain exports like FBX really don't like when you do that. but ys, Softimage parenting is similar to sets . There is no hierachy in that sense. yes, Why would we want to parent objects under others... (won't even go there... sigh) Otherwise, indeed sound sounds like the "shape" is like what can be the "polygon mesh" (or other geo type) "operator", just under what is encapsulated as "an object" or one "thing" in Soft. And in Maya, it's as if an object's "center" was itself like a separate invisible null. (seperate without even any conncection in the DAG (at least by default), and you can only press "down" if shapes are visible in the outliner, ) But this is a fine example of basically everything in Soft/Maya, when it comes to proportions of "power" vs "ease" (and speed) While access to low level things can no doubt be an advantage and can be very powerful, it can also be like a considerable amount of extra things to manage and to "work over" (daily). So there may be occasions where multiple geometries under one transform might be useful, ... but in 96.4729% ;) of the time... And all these "layers of abstraction" in Soft, may not always be the right ones, or you may sometimes find yourself wanting more low level access, but all-in-all they really do seem to be .. having been carefully made with the artist in mind...  while still allowing for quite considerable amounts of "power", and are essentially what makes it FAST & intuitive while "powerful" And I think that was the very point of XSI, which Maya, down to the most basic things, as Miquel said in his video..  could only be "quite different". (also remains true even for things like FCheck vs. Flipbook) On that note BTW, that video does look fine if you overlook all the "I guess it's just different" and the "kinda weird, but once you get use to it" (notably about going into point mode deselecting objects in the outliner.. if shapes displayed, in point mode the outliner shows it's accessing the transform node......) On 02/27/15 10:41, Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote: That vimeo video looks fine, but I can't make sense of the quoted forum discussion below. The video is telling that you Maya always "branch select", i.e. when you pick a parent, the children are highlighted as well. So if you're still modelling on the components, the whole branch will be enabled for component editing, which you may not want. In that case, so you can either pick the shape in the Outliner, or just press Arrow Down on the keyboard, which is the pick walking hotkey. The Shape is like the Primitive in XSI, but since people don't usually deal with the primitives in XSI, I guess that's not really useful. But so that you know, in XSI, there is the primitive, like "polygon mesh" or "Nurbs", which contains the geometry but has no transform, and it's placed in the 3d world by being put under a X3DObject, which has a Kinematics property. In Maya, it's the Shape node that contains the geometry, and the Transform node places it in the 3d word, with the additional twist that you can put multiple shapes under the same transform. I'm not really aware of any problem with this, but people tend to build legends around things they don't often see. On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:49 PM, john clausing <jclausin...@yahoo.com> wrote: i've had the following conversation regarding parenting and hierarchies over on the he3d/maya page. would someone mind translating into Softilanguage for me? this seems like a crucial difference to me. and i don't like it as follows: This is probably helpful for anyone transitioning from Softimage to Maya. ( by the way, never, ever ever ever, parent under objects like this, but he's making a point) https://vimeo.com/120223100 "....by the way, never, ever ever ever, parent under objects like this" because it causes some sort of problem in Maya (that i don't get), or because you just don't like it? Yes, it can cause problems in Maya. Often problems specific to rendering. It's been a while, but I think it involved material mixups or visibility mixups. It's fine to parent to things that aren't renderable, like groups, locators, even splines, though I'm not 100 percent on splines, as I usually use constraints in such a case. you can't parent one object to another? really?.....had no idea it can cause skewing on the objects under objects.. and yes, you can parent under objects, just don't parent the dag of shapes under the dag of other shapes. There is really no reason to parent a cube under another cube. i think us Softimage guys have a whole 'nother idea of what "parenting" is......do i understand this to mean that "don't parent constraint objects to one another",.....rather than "don't assemble them in a hierarchy"? essentially, "middle drag" vs "parent -r", etc yeah, parent -r -shape, is just to parent shapes,, middleDrag/"p"/parent is to parent transforms Its okay, but not usual to parent multiple shapes under one transform, and certain exports like FBX really don't like when you do that. but ys, Softimage parenting is similar to sets . There is no hierachy in that sense.