Re: What were they thinking....
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 attributeonly 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 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 -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
Re: What were they thinking....
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 -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
RE: What were they thinking....
The Z hotkey has apparently been around since 2014 or earlier. But it is at least something I can remove. The Ctrl-V hotkey is new, apparently introduced about Maya 2016 or so. This one is apparently hard-coded into the application somewhere. There are four contexts for this hotkey in Edit(Common), Time Editor, Node Editor, and UV Editor. Nothing is listed for the Outliner. I apparently can't turn this off without breaking normal copy/paste functionality it would seem. There is absolutely no excuse or justification for this kind of sloppiness in interface design. You want there to be impediments to this kind of action in order to insure that it's a proper action to take. Copy a scene unto itself? Really? In who's world is that a common or frequently required need? It's just so ironic, Maya desperately needs streamlining of this type at the interface level, but only if it is useful. This is not useful, nor is it logical, or desirable. I've been waiting 20 years for Maya developers to make standard hotkeys for Outliner, Graph Editor, Hypergraph(Multilister before that), Attribute Editor, and Render View. Stuff that gets opened and used a lot! But there are hotkeys for such obscure things as Lock Curve Length? If you are a Softimage person new to Maya, and you are wondering why everybody seems to have peculiar or nonstandard workflows while in it, this is why. I'm about to trash the standard hotkeys for nth time in 20 years. First removed hotkey: Z First new hotkey: Outliner = 8 Incidentally, I'm still waiting for Maya to delete the 4+ duplicate geometry objects from my scene. If it completes successfully I might be able to recover the scene... next week. Joey -Original Message- From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Morten Bartholdy Sent: Friday, August 25, 2017 4:46 AM To: Official Softimage Users Mailing List. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/xsi_list Subject: Re: What were they thinking What gems you found there. The lack of logical thinking behind the Maya UI and tool design is appalling - I am greying rapidly these days. Morten > Den 24. august 2017 klokken 23:50 skrev "Ponthieux, Joseph G. > (LARC-E1A)[LITES II]" : > > > Having been requested to do a project that would be best suited to do in Maya > because of some of the features Maya provides by default, namely fluids, I > have been using Maya several weeks for the first time in a really long while. > > I thought I would share, especially from a Softimage perspective, apparently > Maya has some hidden hotkeys and some hidden commands associated to existing > hotkeys that did not exist in the past. > > > 1. Z key executes Undo. > > a. Its supposed to be Ctrl-Z, not Z, but apparently Z by itself does > the same thing > > b. As a former Softimage user, prone to hitting the Z key very often, > I've been hitting this key a lot this week. > > c. This command is documented, at least its searchable in the hot key > editor. > > d. The command is redundant and inconsistent and makes it to easy to > undo something. > > e. It has the potential to bite you by undoing your work without your > knowledge. > > > > 2. Ctrl-V executes a scene read, of the currently saved scene into the > existing scene > > a. This happens if you are in the outliner > > b. Its basically the equivalent of import scene > > c. It uses the current scene name as the import > > d. If the scene is previously saved it will add a copy of the scene into > the existing scene > > e. I was in outliner, renaming groups for a massively large scene, in > excess of 4 objects, I forgot to double click an item in the outliner to > initiate the rename of the object name, now it is reading another 40,000+ > objects into my scene. It will be tomorrow before I can salvage it, if at > all... > > f.This command is undocumented, the hot key editor provides no > context for this behavior related to the outliner. > > > > 3. This occurs in Maya 2017. I am sure there are other insanities like > this lurking. Be warned > > > Joey > -- > Softimage Mailing List. > To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with > "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm. -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm. -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
Re: What were they thinking....
What gems you found there. The lack of logical thinking behind the Maya UI and tool design is appalling - I am greying rapidly these days. Morten > Den 24. august 2017 klokken 23:50 skrev "Ponthieux, Joseph G. > (LARC-E1A)[LITES II]" : > > > Having been requested to do a project that would be best suited to do in Maya > because of some of the features Maya provides by default, namely fluids, I > have been using Maya several weeks for the first time in a really long while. > > I thought I would share, especially from a Softimage perspective, apparently > Maya has some hidden hotkeys and some hidden commands associated to existing > hotkeys that did not exist in the past. > > > 1. Z key executes Undo. > > a. Its supposed to be Ctrl-Z, not Z, but apparently Z by itself does > the same thing > > b. As a former Softimage user, prone to hitting the Z key very often, > I've been hitting this key a lot this week. > > c. This command is documented, at least its searchable in the hot key > editor. > > d. The command is redundant and inconsistent and makes it to easy to > undo something. > > e. It has the potential to bite you by undoing your work without your > knowledge. > > > > 2. Ctrl-V executes a scene read, of the currently saved scene into the > existing scene > > a. This happens if you are in the outliner > > b. Its basically the equivalent of import scene > > c. It uses the current scene name as the import > > d. If the scene is previously saved it will add a copy of the scene into > the existing scene > > e. I was in outliner, renaming groups for a massively large scene, in > excess of 4 objects, I forgot to double click an item in the outliner to > initiate the rename of the object name, now it is reading another 40,000+ > objects into my scene. It will be tomorrow before I can salvage it, if at > all... > > f.This command is undocumented, the hot key editor provides no > context for this behavior related to the outliner. > > > > 3. This occurs in Maya 2017. I am sure there are other insanities like > this lurking. Be warned > > > Joey > -- > Softimage Mailing List. > To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with > "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm. -- Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to softimage-requ...@listproc.autodesk.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
