Hum, didn't know that these
differences.
Also maybe another quite important way Maya probably wont come
close to XSI
could be represented by that highlighted arrow .
From this vid at around 9min.
Pipeline
Basics
![]()
In Maya, once something is rigged (for instance), even changing
UV's (or materials?) is like 'dangerous' or risky.
Having the character refrerenced seems to at least help with
*some* model changes.
While In XSI, you can literally make tweaks to modeling while
the envelope is active,
add (topo) details, or change whatever on the fly, freeze the
changes or not, no worries.
Because that highlighted arrow quite often needs to be repeated
over and over a couple of times.
and it's a great level of freedom, to just go and change things,
and not have it be the end of the world in terms of time
requirements.
That of course goes for rigging, but it also goes for
practically every kind of setup, or sequence of operations to
perform.
like Subdividing ... shrinkwrapping... the list goes on ...
To change things you don't -have- to redo things, or need to
have scripts that redo things.
The stack has it's share of wonkyness,
I personally have had to have a couple of muted Push operators
just as placeholders that help position things at the very top
or very bottom of the stack, and it took forever to realize how
"disable from here" helped reorder or insert otherwise
unreorderable things,
but once over these few things, there is no stage that has
things that become inaccessible, inedtable, or non-deletable,
and that includes ICE operators.
That of course doesn't in any way reduce Maya's definite
strengths in different areas.
Maybe in the best of worlds, Maya and Houdini would be merged
into one thing (and owned by sideFX),
but thinking of a Maya/Houdini merger, it's hard to not think
about XSI, because that is what it essentially is
(except with also tons of c4d straight forwardness,
because a straight Maya/Houdini hybrid would be as much of a
pain to use as either one of them on their own :P )
Anyhoo,
Cheers!
On 08/25/17 16:36, Matt Lind wrote:
The Maya SDK is no better.
Excruciating teeth-pulling experience to do really basic things as concepts
are not explained, or explained well. Every node is purpose-built and has
it's own secret handshakes to use making it difficult to write generalized
and reusable code to perform common tasks. Using the SDK basically involves
studying the graph as seen in the node editor, dissecting how it was built,
then repeating it in your code...only to find out even if you replicate the
exact same setup it doesn't behave the same. There are additional hidden
tricks you must know to get those last pieces to drop into place. You can
very easily fall into the trap of attempting to write your own abstraction
layer just to make the pieces less cumbersome to use, but just when you
think you've wrapped everything nicely, Maya throws you one of it's endless
supply of idiosyncratic surprises.
Example: constraints
In softimage, each constraint is a separate operator that lives in an
object's construction history. Every time you add a constraint, it is added
to the construction history in the order which it was applied. A lot more
may be going on under the hood, but to the end user it's very straight
forward.
In Maya, if you attempt to add more than one of the same type of constraint
to an object (e.g. two point constraints), instead of making two distinct
constraint operator nodes like in Softimage, Maya consolidates them into a
single constraint node with multiple inputs blended internally - but you
have to supply your own blendweight slider to do that (they don't mention
that in the SDK docs). Since each constraint type has slightly different
inputs and outputs, you write your own abstraction layer to handle the
differences, only to discover that if two different types of constraints
affecting the same attribute of an object are applied (e.g. point and parent
constraint competing for the 'position' attribute), Maya throws the curve
ball of inserting a 'pairBlend' node, which is like mix2colors node, but for
transforms instead of colors. Great. Now you must revise your logic in
your abstraction layer to account for that. Then you start testing again
applying a point constraint, then a parent constraint, then another type of
constraint which also competes for the position attribute....only to
discover Maya now removes the pairBlend node and rearranges the constraints
into an entirely different arrangement you cannot predict. This is why Maya
will always suck. Probably also explains why a lot of the C++ sample code I
see wraps MEL commands instead of digging into the dependency graph.
I haven't followed Maya development, but from a distance it appears they're
focusing on revamping the underlying core right now and will worry about the
UI later. However, given the idiosyncratic framework, I honestly don't see
a slick and user friendly UI (a la Softimage forthcoming) at any point in
time. The way Maya is (currently) built won't allow it.
In short, they weren't thinking.
Matt
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:41:26 -0700
From: Meng-Yang Lu <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: What were they thinking....
To: "Official Softimage Users Mailing List.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/xsi_list"
The copy and paste is pretty bad. Haven't done it in years because of the
PTSD, but I remembered it would put "__pasted__" on the names of the
objects that were pasted over, assuming you wanted to do that in the first
place.
It's not a finely-tuned generalist tool like Softimage is out of the box.
And before, you could forgive it's shortcomings because in the Motif UI
days, it was ugly, but stupid fast. Hotbox, plus marking menus, plus
hotkeys made you fast. Now the UI lag pretty much sapped the joy from
those UI features.
Maya has had a tough time adapting to the times. I see other developers
more in-tuned with the day to day tasks of production and developing tools
that help artists get through their day. Not sure why ADSK can't move the
needle in a meaningful way when it comes to Maya releases. I feel like
they should go and buy new computers, install maya out of the box, and try
to put together a 3 min short film. The pitfalls would be pretty obvious
imo.
peace,
-Lu
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