Hey Simon
I've done a few Maya jobs as part of a team the past few months.
The people on the team were very experienced, helpful and patient with me.
Doing this on your own is madness!!
I did some rigging, and I actually think Maya is pretty good at creating
rigs. Its the deformation of the rigged objects that drove me up the wall.
I did allot of lighting and rendering, and at first glance, liked the
node editor. Then you get to the details and realize that many things
that should work, don't.
Animating is ok, but the graph editor hurt my brain. I couldn't figure
out how to set the key handles length and angle by typing values for
example.
I did a huge bifrost job, and I'm sure bifrost will be great one day..
but I might not live that long.
Nparticles ..... how the hell is this the industry leader????
Everything in maya feels like you need to learn new software to do
something... It feels like after you've learned to rotate a cube, it
doesn't necessarily mean you can now rotate a torus!
Too much scripting that makes you feel like you're finishing the
developers job.
Sure houdini is full of scripting, but at least you feel like you're
scripting to make cool things, not to just , I don't know, select a
hierarchy, or kill a particle.
I've done a few houdini tutorials, and my first real job finished today.
The job I just did in houdini is sooo far out of my reach in maya, and
would even be a bit of a mission with ICE.
Fair enough it is a frost effect on a pack shot, but still.. fun was had!
The best part is: I don't feel like I need a strong drink at the end of
the day.
G
On 17/03/2015 12:54, Simon Reeves wrote:
Can I ask, what areas having you been using Maya/Houdini that spurred
you to make the post?
I've been using Maya for a couple of months for scene
assembly/rendering, (bringing in models/caches/assigning
shaders/passes) so that's my only experience.
Simon Reeves
London, UK
/[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>/
/www.simonreeves.com <http://www.simonreeves.com>/
/www.analogstudio.co.uk <http://www.analogstudio.co.uk>//
/
On 17 March 2015 at 10:08, adrian wyer <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
excellent closing quote, Side Effects should use that in their
commercials!
"...there's a SOP for that!"
a
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of
Gerbrand Nel
Sent: 17 March 2015 10:12
To: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Very OT: for the love of your career.. try houdini
I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I might
save the life of a fellow artist.
So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I can
compete against people straight out of collage.
This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced softimage
artists here in South Africa.
At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all
has to
happen in maya for me.
My brain doesn't work the way maya works.
I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to
do now,
just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks from now, lead
to allot of back tracking.
At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price tag
of Houdini FX.
It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if
I was
one, of only a few houdini artists around.
Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these
concerns.
The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a
concern to me.
I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with
it, than
I can with Maya after a year.
The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole package
works as one. Once you get your head around its fundamentals, doing
something new is fun and pretty easy.
This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a non
destructive open work flow.
So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with the
whole "there is a script for that" mentality... there is a sop for
that
G
