On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 2:41 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <luceri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 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. > > Sure, and you also have multiple transforms owning the same shape for instancing, which often confuses the hell out of people, however technically correct it is :) As for multiple shapes under a transform, there have been genuine issues with it in the past with it, and some remain, though the ones that remain are mostly in custom tools, hacks, and people's heads. One is that Maya's auto-naming can easily turn inconsistent or hard to parse if shapes move in and out of different transnforms and start being mulitple-per, so a lot of cheapo in-house scripts tended to fail in that case, and it doesn't help that there are no valid events to monitor and catch parenting (that I know of, I should add) to gate that, whereas creation is obviously a lot easier to gate keep. The other thing is that a lot of tools use simpler than they should implementations to deal with shapes (extendToShape to the first shape) instead of contemplating multiple shape per transform cases, and therefore leave a mess behind or refuse to work in the multiple shapes per transform scenario, but that's not Maya's fault. All in all it's not really an issue with Maya. We do use multiple shapes and instanced shapes (the only way to emulate Soft proxies, really), and have no issues with it, but this is now, years ago it was a lot worse, and that rep stuck. It's also true that moving shapes around in Maya or manually instancing requires you use scripts, the UI and the availale commands are ill suited to handling it.
