Le mercredi 8 janvier 2014, David Gallagher a écrit :
I rigged on quite a few characters in Maya at Blue Sky
Studios and now (Softimage) AnimSchool. We offer the
well-known "Malcolm" rig for free.
There is no comparison to rigging in Softimage and Maya--not
the kind of rigging I do. I often assume by now they have
better workflows in Maya, but I'm often surprised to find how
convoluted and limiting the workflows are to this day. Most
Maya people must not know there are better ways of working or
aren't doing the kinds of things I am, because the difference
is profound.
-At any point in the rigging process, you can make edits in
the model stack to change the shape and topology of the
model. After experimenting, you can freeze that part of the
stack and continue on with that new shape, retaining almost
every bit of work you've done.
YOU CAN CHANGE THE TOPOLOGY. YOU CAN CHANGE THE SHAPE FREELY.
This difference is huge. You can work toward completion
without fear of losing work. You can experiment
freely--knowing it's fine if you want to make a major change.
I'm never afraid of losing blendshape work.
And if the changes are really significant, you can always
Gator you're way out of a jam.
-You can do blendshape edits directly on the geometry,
modelessly, instead of on a separate blendshape object.
Ith
-There is no comparison with corrective blendshapes. In
Softimage, you go to Secondary Shape mode and drag a few points.
In Maya, I wish you luck. You can install one of several
plug-ins and scripts and HOPE that it works. If the scenario
is simple enough, it might.
Several people here tried to help a student make a single
corrective blendshape on an elbow -- and we're all
experienced Maya riggers. After hours of attempting, we threw
up our hands. There was something in that object's history
that was making the blendshape plug-in fail. The answer is
what it often is: just start over.
-EDITING corrective blendshapes. In Maya, heaven help you if
you want to edit that blendshape later. Start the process
again and make a new one. In Softimage, drag a few points and
you're done in seconds.
-For facial work, being able to make face shapes in
conjunction with the mixer, working directly on the main geo.
To see other shapes muted, soloed as you're working. This
allows you to craft shapes that work for different scenarios,
with just the right falloff. You can make correctives for
shape combinations quickly. In face work, it's all about how
the functions combine to make the range of expressive results.
-The envelope weighting is far superior. The smoothing is
just better, and more reliable. Negative weight painting
actually works.
Being able to make sophisticated weighting allows you to make
lighter rigs, because fewer nodes and calculations are needed.
I can't believe someone actually compared Maya's Component
Editor to Softimage's Weight Editor. I'm stunned.
Sometimes, demoing Maya's envelope weighting, it just stops
working for no reason -- I have no idea why. (Mind you, I've
been rigging in Maya since 1999.)
-You can envelope/skin null objects, not just joints. (Yes,
Maya will let you add other objects as deformers but it is
limiting and causes problems.)
-The tweak tool. You can grab anywhere and it will just get
the nearest point/edge/poly and transform it precisely. Add
the proportional editing and it's very sculptural without
giving up precise transform control. I far prefer this
workflow to the Zbrush approach geared toward paintstrokes.
-In Softimage, you can change the wireframe on shaded
opacity. You can change the point sizes. These mean I can
visualize and work with the shape, not get visually stuck on
the tech clutter like in Maya.
-LinkWithOrientation. Does Maya have anything built-in yet? I
know there are pose readers out there, but they are slow and
3rd party.
-The "smooth preview" Geometry Approximation is better,
faster, and more stable in Softimage.
-Even with the army of tools and plug-ins we had at Blue Sky
Studios, I would still much rather use off-the-shelf Softimage.
-You can select controls without selecting (and highlighting)
all its children. This makes it easier to animate the rig --
just drag selecting will get you the selectable controls. In
Maya, drag-selecting gets a mixture of heirarchy parts.
All this means that I can focus on the ART, the shaping of
the rig, not jump through hoops all day.
As a result, our characters are more flexible and expressive.
On 1/8/2014 2:30 AM, Stefan Kubicek wrote:
To be fair, I weighted a fair amount of characters in Maya
over the years but I never experienced anything like that.
When exactly is this happening? The only hickup I ran into
occasionally was when painting weights, and then undoing
that operation, which in rare cases does what you describe,
but I think they fixed that in version 2013 or 2014. I never
locked the skin weights, workflow wise I always found that
highly disruptive.
I was quite shocked to learn from riggers in my last
job, that in maya you have to "lock all bones but the
ones you want to weight to via small tick boxes" failure
to do so aparently causing maya to through random
influences around...
On 8 January 2014 02:22, Alan Fregtman
<alan.fregt...@gmail.com> wrote:
Last time I had to use Maya I would use Crosswalk to
transfer the skinned mesh from Maya to Soft, do my
weighting in home sweet home, then I wrote an
exporter that saved out my weights in the
"/cometSaveWeights/" format. Life saver!
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Steven Caron
<car...@gmail.com> wrote:
arg, figured it out.
import pymel.core as pm
pm.select(pm.skinCluster(pm.selected()[0],
query=True, influence=True))
best UI ever!
On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Steven Caron
<car...@gmail.com> wrote:
this thread is some what well timed... i am
in maya right now. i need to get a mesh and
its skin/envelope into softimage. i did not
rig this object and i don't know enough
about maya to try and understand it through
inspection. in softimage i would select the
mesh, then select the deformers from
envelope, then key frame those objects and
remove the constraints on them in mass with
'remove all constraints'
