Yes weight painting is bullshit for precise work, however if you don't
have much time and you need it to be quick and can afford it being
dirty...
It's been a while, so i don't remember, but is Soft the only package
with a workflow to select the bone you want to weight to directly in
the viewport? instead of scrolling endlessly through lists ? its kinda
clunky in soft, (takes a few seconds for the selected deformer to
register). but it works!
Does nothing else have this functionality? it seems like such a no
brainner...
Maya is exceptionally guilty of the joint list scrolling, as the
window is tiny, can not be resized (to my knowledge) and in spite of
this, requires you to lock every bone but the 2 you are weighting,
manually ! forcing you to run up and down every time you need to
change what you are skinning to.
On 25 January 2016 at 07:03, Martin Yara <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
For v2014 and later I'd recommend Skin Wrangler, a pyQT+python
tool that is pretty good for that kind of workflow. And for 2013
and previous versions without pyQT support, Max Skin Weight Tool,
a mel script based on Max workflow.
In games, at least here and other places I've worked, we rarely
use paint weights because it is more common to have mistakes and
uneven weights.
Maya's Weight Hammer is the equivalent to Softimage's smooth
weights, but way inferior and without any option at all. I rarely
use it because it tends to mess up my weights smoothing it too
much and using influences I don't want to. SI's smooth weights
could work very nice selecting all points (ex: the whole snake
model), while Maya's Hammer do some decent job only if you select
the points where the joints intersect.
If someone at Autodesk is reading, is it possible to have
Softimage Smooth Weights to be ported to Maya?
ngSkinTools smooth was nice, but I didn't get used to it's
workflow. I may give it another try when I need to paint weights.
I found another tool called as_SmoothNearest that looked good in
the video demo, but it ended up being a combination of the Maya's
default Weight Hammer command and grow selection. And without
using the normalizing option with a potentially risk to have 1+
total weights per point. I fixed that code but, still not quite
what I wanted.
I ended up writing a custom tool to use smooth paint for selected
weights and lock all the other joints so it would only smooth
based on the selected points deformers. Now with that,
SkinWrangler and Maya's Heat Map, my weighting workflow is a
little less painful.
Martin
On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Sebastien Sterling
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I remember skinning in max, not the best but definitely not
the worst, it didn't have any pretences let's say, you HAD to
use vertex weight selection assignments or "Weight Tool"
(envelops are garbage), and they had a very practical little
menu for that, with options for assigning a few default
pre-sets, 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, as well as the ability to
copy/past values.
selection assignment is the slowest method, not great for fast
turn around, but it is also the most precise method.
Softimage kind of had something similar, plus a really good
smoothing algorithm, (is it just me or was soft's smooth
weight function, the bomb ?!)
Is there anything like this for maya currently, like max's
weight tool i mean ? and the first words better not be "In
Bonus tools ... !" so help me god !
On 24 January 2016 at 13:50, Graham Bell <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Man I feel you guys’ pain.
I haven’t rigged in Maya for a while, but the thing is if
you’ve been in Maya land for some time, then you kinda get
to know how it works and get the best from it. Many guys
like it, because they can get quiet deep into it, but like
anything it’s not without its eccentricities. If you’re
gonna keep on comparing to Soft though, then you’re in for
constant disappointment. But holey moly don’t go near Max
for rigging, imho. J
As Adam says, there’s been a lot of talk on Beta about the
rigging and without breeching NDAs there is a desire to
start addressing stuff. It seems the work on the parallel
performance in 2016 perhaps might be the start of that.
Certainly that stuff has gone down well with people.
On the modelling front, Maya’s been going through an
overhaul in recent versions. Up to 2016 there was a lot of
overlap between what was the NEX stuff and the legacy Maya
tools, but a lot of that got fixed in 2016 onwards. Imo I
like the modelling in 2016, it’s in a very good state. The
improvement in the pivot editing alone was worth it.
*From:*[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
[mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] *On
Behalf Of *Sebastien Sterling
*Sent:* 24 January 2016 09:06
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: So.. Maya rigging is still a thing...
Hey Jordi Bear ! what is skinning like in Houdini ? and
have you tried Fabric for rigging ?
On 24 January 2016 at 08:56, Jordi Bares
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
It may not be the only solution, it is really up to you.
On 23 January 2016 at 18:54, F Sanchez
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Its 2016 already. Is there no other app that will
ever take the place of Maya? (Besides a future
resurrection of Softimage which is not going to
happen. ) Sure I can use XSI when working on my
own but if you need to work on site it will now
have to be Maya from now on. :(
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Sebastien
Sterling <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
"I'm still holding out that fabric engine will
become a solution for rigging"
Here, here man !
"I can paint weights and build a rig in Maya
using fabric to do all the heavy work. I can
paint weights and build a rig in Maya using
fabric to do all the heavy work. "
so you can build a Rig in fabric, as a
generalist ?
can you paint weights in it as well ?
I too hope Fabric blossoms into the next era
of DCC's
On 23 January 2016 at 00:48, Michael Amasio
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm still holding out that fabric engine
will become a solution for rigging. It's
not all that magical for something complex
in Maya. Which as I'm sure several of you
have discovered is a bit of a Maya problem.
I can paint weights and build a rig in
Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work.
But when it approaches the quality I
require, fabric is providing all the
computational speed I need , BUT all that
speed is lost as it converts data back and
forth between data Maya can use and KL. I
actually get faster results out of the new
Maya GPU accelerated.
...but faster results out of XSI. Good
old XSI.
I love it when a studio has like one
license for XSI. I always snatch it up
and never turn my box off.
I've made a career off of lurking in the
background making stuff like 5 times
faster in XSI.
I know it's childish to enjoy, but I still
enjoy a good rant about the pain of
rigging in Maya.
On Jan 22, 2016 3:31 PM, "Eugene Flormata"
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Yah, not sure why there's no
improvement in the processflow for
rigging in that much time, almost in
any program i see, so many
advancements in modeling. but nothing
for rigging.
no zbrush of rigging so to speak.
I like how there's notes and tips even
when you just turn on the quaddraw.
feels really thought out.
a lot of maya feels like different
programs just stapled together in a
package
vs XSI's whole package made for one
user mentality.
I just thought quad draw had that feel
to it.
I've not made any rigs in maya yet,
and all my XSI rigs were pretty basic
but at least while I was rigging, i
wasn't punished for something i wanted
to go back and change in XSI whenever
you learned something about your mesh
you wanted to animate.
which the real benefit to the XSI over
maya, it reduced the number of
iterations in the learning process.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Eric
Turman <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm glad you are liking your new
modeling tools, Eugene. However I
believe that it is important to
make the distinction that it is
not about the confusion in Maya
rigging--at least not for me; I do
not find Maya confusing at all.
What the huge issue with Maya is
that its limited rigging tool-set
combined with archaic workflow
make the task of rigging
drudgery.*Drudgery* is the key
word more than confusion. I have
made many character rigs in Maya
over the past fifteen-plus years
and Maya still sucks at it.
--
www.johnrichardsanchez.com
<http://www.johnrichardsanchez.com>
