Arguments are good. That's where the truth comes out from having to prove a point one way or another.
We need to do simulation too, but mostly for clothing or tapestries. The hard part for us is getting the motion to look natural and meaningful, but also loop seamlessly over a short duration and blend with other actions doing the same. Example: Our main avatar has over 700 unique actions (walk, run, jump, roll left, roll right, die, etc...). The longest action I can find is about 200 frames long and the average case about 45-60 frames (animating at 30 fps). If a piece of cloth is animated, it needs to start and end in the same position for all actions that move that cloth because any action can transition into almost any other action at runtime. The hard part is finding cloth poses that look natural and flow nicely in those transitions while being able to loop without looking stupid. Another difficult part is getting the cloth to animate correctly because all the avatar performs his actions in place a the world origin on a pedastal. He doesn't travel around as seen in the runtime environment. So far we've been doing it all manually via keying the envelope deformers. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Meng-Yang Lu Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 2:27 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: rigging in xsi vs maya What does XSI users use for skin simulation these days? All custom stuff in ICE? We've been leveraging nCloth quite a bit lately and arguably, it's the only piece of tech that 3D peeps here regardless of app preference can unanimously agree that it is indeed pretty good. Maybe not significant for games, but plays a big part of what we do day to day. The other thing is speed. This is subjective, but not without me observing over the years that if you get rigs of similar complexity, however you get there, animating a handful in Maya is usually no problem while doing the same in XSI feels a bit slow. Not trying to argue, Matt. If forced to pick A or B, I'd find a way regardless. Just trying to be objective and see what bounces back because we're always looking for faster and better ways of doing stuff. -Lu On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 2:03 PM, Matt Lind <ml...@carbinestudios.com<mailto:ml...@carbinestudios.com>> wrote: So what does maya rigging tools have that Softimage doesn't that makes a significant difference at the end of the day? Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com> [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com>] On Behalf Of Steven Caron Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 1:58 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com> Subject: Re: rigging in xsi vs maya of course everyone would do this, which is why it seems silly to attempt and quantify it at all. i know i have bias and i know trained maya talent do too... i love to squabble about this stuff in my work environment but it is half fun these days. i know there are issues on both sides... but i am not going to post a blog dedicated to it. On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:42 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <luceri...@gmail.com<mailto:luceri...@gmail.com>> wrote: everyone would do this, imho, everyone has their thing they like here or there. About the IK chains in Softimage, when all you did in 10 years is rig like Softimage, it's second nature and you accept the way it works as how things work (with nulls, etc) I think the discussion in general is deep and interesting, although those first 3 paragraphs seem way too harsh. I've read some of these comments from client reports.
