That vimeo video looks fine, but I can't make sense of the quoted forum discussion below.
The video is telling that you Maya always "branch select", i.e. when you pick a parent, the children are highlighted as well. So if you're still modelling on the components, the whole branch will be enabled for component editing, which you may not want. In that case, so you can either pick the shape in the Outliner, or just press Arrow Down on the keyboard, which is the pick walking hotkey. The Shape is like the Primitive in XSI, but since people don't usually deal with the primitives in XSI, I guess that's not really useful. But so that you know, in XSI, there is the primitive, like "polygon mesh" or "Nurbs", which contains the geometry but has no transform, and it's placed in the 3d world by being put under a X3DObject, which has a Kinematics property. In Maya, it's the Shape node that contains the geometry, and the Transform node places it in the 3d word, with the additional twist that you can put multiple shapes under the same transform. I'm not really aware of any problem with this, but people tend to build legends around things they don't often see. On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:49 PM, john clausing <jclausin...@yahoo.com> wrote: > i've had the following conversation regarding parenting and hierarchies over > on the he3d/maya page. > would someone mind translating into Softilanguage for me? this seems like a > crucial difference to me. > > and i don't like it > > as follows: > > > This is probably helpful for anyone transitioning from Softimage to Maya. > ( by the way, never, ever ever ever, parent under objects like this, but > he's making a point) > > https://vimeo.com/120223100 > > "....by the way, never, ever ever ever, parent under objects like this" > because it causes some sort of problem in Maya (that i don't get), or > because you just don't like it? > > Yes, it can cause problems in Maya. Often problems specific to rendering. > It's been a while, but I think it involved material mixups or visibility > mixups. It's fine to parent to things that aren't renderable, like groups, > locators, even splines, though I'm not 100 percent on splines, as I usually > use constraints in such a case. > > you can't parent one object to another? really?.....had no idea > > it can cause skewing on the objects under objects.. and yes, you can parent > under objects, just don't parent the dag of shapes under the dag of other > shapes. There is really no reason to parent a cube under another cube. > > i think us Softimage guys have a whole 'nother idea of what "parenting" > is......do i understand this to mean that "don't parent constraint objects > to one another",.....rather than "don't assemble them in a hierarchy"? > essentially, "middle drag" vs "parent -r", etc > > yeah, parent -r -shape, is just to parent shapes,, middleDrag/"p"/parent is > to parent transforms Its okay, but not usual to parent multiple shapes under > one transform, and certain exports like FBX really don't like when you do > that. but ys, Softimage parenting is similar to sets . There is no hierachy > in that sense. > > > >
