Re: rigging in xsi vs maya

[Sergio Mucino]

I've been doing quite a bit of rigging in Modo lately, and I have been very surprised by its capabilities. One thing they do support is heat mapping.  It's quite nice to use, but there are several requirement that need to be met for a mesh to be acceptable for heat binding. I don't know if all heat mapping implementations are based on the same algo(s), and therefore, inherit the same requirements, but here they go (copying/pasting from the docs): --Mesh must form a volume, though holes are supported (such as eye sockets). --Target mesh must be only polygonal, no single vertices, floating edges or curves can be present. --No shared vertices, edges or polygons (non-manifold surfaces) allowed between multiple components. --All joints must be contained within the volume of the mesh. Otherwise, you can still use the available smooth or rigid binding methods. I don't know if any problems you ran into could be due to some of these conditions, but there... just in case. On 08/01/2014 8:31 AM, Sebastien Sterling wrote: One feature i would have loved to see implemented across the board of autodesk products (apart from Alembic which should really just be a new standard by now...) is the heat map algorithm. in theory, is this that difficult to implement in Soft and Max ? apparently it was made by a bunch of students checking up on heat distribution algorithm papers for designing old radiators. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCBx8MjEvvo On paper it looks like the best shit ever, so we of the CHR Dep wanted to use it to test characters for deformation in maya pre rigging. trouble was, apparently its extremely susceptible, and i'm not quite sure to what, topology, mesh density... but in any case a Lead at rigging scripted a small ui allowing us to just bypass most of the checks, making the tech actually usable, and it worked great... until we realised that it actually pops vertices slightly away from their initial position... in fairness we used a script to access these capabilities so maybe that caused the problem, i doubt it but there was tampering, maybe someone else has had more controled experiences with Heat mapping, like i said before it still seems like a really useful addition, On 8 January 2014 10:52, Tim Leydecker <bauero...@gmx.de> wrote: Using a 3DSMax rigged sample character scene from the UDK docs, I made a roundtrip through Maya and Softimage using the *.fbx format. I didn´t try to export any rig controls, just a "human" rig. It´s worth checking to have the latest *.fbx version installed and using an export preset that seems applicable, I think I resorted to "Autodesk Media Entertainment 2012 bla" (im on 2012´s). I can´t say if that was the best way but that roundtrip worked. I ended up with Maya/3DSMax/Softimage each having the rigged, animated character in a scene. In my case, there was some nuisance with the BIPED rig getting interpreted as a second rig the character is rigged to in Softimage, I had to delete that biped in XSI to get back to similar results as in 3DSMax, leaving only the rig meant for export - it is likely that was my export settings or selection settings. I had straight results going from Maya to Softimage. Cheers, tim On 07.01.2014 23:58, Steven Caron 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' is NONE of that doable in maya? cause i am having a hell of a time figuring it out. s --