So.. Maya rigging is still a thing...

[Sebastien Sterling]

"Hung drawn and quartered" (as described by the dictionary) is an English medieval form of

torture, visited upon heretics, the practice of which consisted of:

Being dragged through the streets, broken on a wheel and made witness to your own burning

viscera, before being hung by the neck. It is a gory, utterly barbaric spectacle and a perfectly

adequate fate for the designer(s) responsible for the Maya rigging experience.

whoever this person is, "Fire" is too good for you.

This level of shit was embarrassing in 2004.

[Chris Johnson]

Ha....awesome.

--

Chris Johnson | www.someonescousin.com | 416.473.1624

                    

[Mirko Jankovic]

so true so true... 

[Gerbrand Nel]

I know many of us are forced by employers or situations to convert to maya.
My heart goes out to you!
But the rest of you fuckers who choose to go to maya over all the other options out there.
You have made your beds, now burn in them.

[Mirko Jankovic]

But they don;t know for better so burning bed for them is as good as it gets.

They have no idea what is a fluffy feeling of Softimage around you :(

[Enter Reality]

I'm still astonished by the missing features in Maya in 2016...seriously, it never gets old.

Ops sorry, I mean that those features are not missing but it's up to the user to build their own...they give you the tools, you build what you need.

They should really use Churchill face as the new logo for Maya.

[Gerbrand Nel]

Hey guys
Is it just me or did autodesk break the obj exporter in soft?
When I try to export something, it asks me to name the file, and then
when I click export, it asks me again to select the obj.
Almost like it wants to either overwrite something, or import something.
G

[Stefan Kubicek]

There are only two kinds of 3D Artists:

Those who use Softimage, and those who never tried.

The story of Softimage's demise is one of ignorance.

[Olivier Jeannel]

I did it the other day, worked as expected.

[Olivier Jeannel]

That is very true Stefan.

And people look at you weird just because you're not in the Maya majority...

It's like speaking of the taste of chiken inside a kfc, nobody get's a clue.

[Tom Kleinenberg]

At college we were taught Max and Maya. Maya was by far the most popular with students. I never much cared for it, so I always asked "What do you like about it over Max?" I couldn't ever get a straight answer and was generally fobbed off with something like "Well, they used it in the Matrix/Lord of the Rings/etc". Made me sad.

[Mirko Jankovic]

heheh well actually Max is even worse. Wouldn't animate in it if it was gazillion usd per day pay rate.

whats use of money when you end up in asilium

[Sandy Sutherland]

We never got you rigging in Softimage then Tom - ;)

S.

[Tom Kleinenberg]

Heh, sorry, what I meant was sad was the blind crowd-think. I learnt pretty quickly that that any tool can do anything (when at a Lightwave studio and they were trumpeting how Lightwave was used for bits of Ironman). Some tools are just easier than others for certain tasks and Softimage does 90% of what I do in the easiest way I've come across.

And no Sandy, you never got my rigging, not even in XSI :) One day, one day...

[Sebastien Sterling]

Is Fabric at a point where one can use it as a stand alone rigging and skinning platform i wonder ? not much hope of getting studios to adopt, specially not those that rely on sweat shops. but it would be nice to try and sow some better seeds.

Softies i love you all, sorry for venting but sometimes it really feels desperate, to come back to rigging in maya a decade later and the most impactful thing to be added is, delta much, tech from another dying company, that everyone and there dog was able to replicate it seems.

But no, you come back and the skinning tools are still, shit. The weight painting is a death sentence, the weight smoothing, is a death sentence, the UI for scrubbing through the list of deformers makes me want to snuff it, they still expect you to lock every single joint, less it start firing weights randomly into other deformers. erase influence in a finger, it ends up in a leg... more then just the crippled demented functionality, the feel of the whole thing is off, having to reload the weighting interface every time you want to translate or rotate a bone.... the list goes on and on,

[Christian Freisleder]

Try installing/reinstalling the latest crosswalk.
I think that did it for me, when I was having the same problem. 90% sure
it was obj problems too.

hope that does the trick.

christian

[Ognjen Vukovic]

I suppose at the pace sideFX are steamrolling their app, it could be a functional animation software given a year or two. But thats just  a guess from my side, maybe someone could comment on that who has a bit more knowledge on H.  

Then it could easily snap out the mayas position of industry leader, I just wish indy version would support the redshift plug in thats coming out, that would make it a no brainer for me personaly as to where i would pledge my allegiances to..

[Olivier Jeannel]

Amen to that Ognjen !

[Adam Sale]

Sebastien... re rigging in Maya

you come back and the skinning tools are still, shit. The weight painting is a death sentence, the weight smoothing, is a death sentence, the UI for scrubbing through the list of deformers makes me want to snuff it, they still expect you to lock every single joint, less it start firing weights randomly into other deformers. erase influence in a finger, it ends up in a leg... more then just the crippled demented functionality, the feel of the whole thing is off, having to reload the weighting interface every time you want to translate or rotate a bone.... the list goes on and on,

Bang On. 

On my latest face rig in Maya, the back and forth between weights bleeding onto unrelated joints a mile away is insane. The locking and unlocking thing doesn't really work the way you think it should. I mean, even if the joints are locked, you can still edit their weights, which I guess means that locking is only good for the normalization process when Maya decides to reassign loose weights elsewhere. Joint orients, Lack of access and functionality to weight editors, paint weights that need reloading constantly. I have learned how to work around all these issues, and I think i will post a video at some point, so I can remember myself ;-)

Without giving anything away based on our NDA, those of us SI folk on the Maya beta list, have been hammering rigging reform for a couple of years now. There is a giant list that's been assembled, and waiting for implementation !!

Adam

[Greg Punchatz]

Does not sound fun....

[Mirko Jankovic]

" I have learned how to work around all these issues,"

And again it proves correct.

With Maya you workaround

with Softimage you work!

[Sven Constable]

When I read this I feel so happy using Softimage, really. It's a pleasure every day. I often work on things not necessarily but I have the free time to spend. For an extra mile to polish animation or renderings. Or cleaning scenes, make them more efficient. Setting up passes, things like that. The software got my back. ;)

 

sven

[Sebastien Sterling]

Adam Sale

Maybe if they get enough requests, they will EOL Maya :), that seems to be there modus apparandi, "we have a software, we took their money, they made requests, we canceled our software = no more requests !!!"

I would like to put on a braver face man, but they have had decades to look into this stuff, and it doesn't look like they have any interest in doing much more then shoving more stupid ineffective weighting algorithms.

 If you have devised any methods to survive this particular jungle, any info is appreciated I'm sure i speak for all in this matter, that said i'd hate to subject anyone to more maya time :P

I'm going to bring it up again cause quite frankly fuck them for still unerringly daring not to have such a simple fucking feature, but hiding polygons ? really ? guys ? this we can not have ?

it seems stupid, but people donm't seem to realise what a god send that feature is,

if you are skinning a hand, and you want to weight the inside of the palm so it isn't crashing in on itself...

if you wand to weight(or even model) a mouth bag, behind lips ...

if you have multiple pieces of geo making up your characters hair and you want to weight them individually...

(in a "lesser" DCC (apparently) you would... hide.. the polygons?)

In maya the excuse you will be given, is "well you can isol"...FUCK OFF!!! isolate is a stupid solution, that requires way to many steps, and requires multy selections, something that for some retarded reason maya can't do ?! and hides everything even the bones you want to weight to.

these are not small things, these are core functionality that is missing, if you can't get this shit right then maybe you should not be in the software game.

... kind of went off there again a bit, sorry guys :P but god damn, GOD DAMN !

[Eric Turman]

Agreed

"In maya the excuse you will be given, is "well you can isol"...FUCK OFF!!! isolate is a stupid solution, that requires way to many steps, and requires multy selections, something that for some retarded reason maya can't do ?! and hides everything even the bones you want to weight to.

these are not small things, these are core functionality that is missing, if you can't get this shit right then maybe you should not be in the software game."

Maya and their ignorant user base offer excuses, workarounds, and patchwork script solutions where as we had real working solutions right out of the box with Softimage. 

P.S.  It is a shame that you didn't win the lottery Greg ;)

--

-=T=-

[Eugene Flormata]

as much confusion rigging in maya brings, I'm really liking the quaddraw tool and sculpting.

[Eric Turman]

I'm glad you are liking your new modeling tools, Eugene. However I believe that it is important to make the distinction that it is not about the confusion in Maya rigging--at least not for me; I do not find Maya confusing at all. What the huge issue with Maya is that its limited rigging tool-set combined with archaic workflow make the task of rigging drudgery. Drudgery is the key word more than confusion. I have made many character rigs in Maya over the past fifteen-plus years and Maya still sucks at it.

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Eugene Flormata <Eug...@flormata.com> wrote:

as much confusion rigging in maya brings, I'm really liking the quaddraw tool and sculpting.

--

-=T=-

[Greg Punchatz]

... kind of went off there again a bit, sorry guys :P but god damn, GOD DAMN !

[Greg Punchatz]

P.S.  It is a shame that you didn't win the lottery Greg ;)

We would be having a whole different discussion now wouldn't we? :) 

[Jennifer Goldfinch]

Would I have to call you Mr GregTheBoss if you had? :)

[Eugene Flormata]

Yah, not sure why there's no improvement in the processflow for rigging in that much time, almost in any program i see, so many advancements in modeling. but nothing for rigging.
no zbrush of rigging so to speak.

I like how there's notes and tips even when you just turn on the quaddraw. feels really thought out.

a lot of maya feels like different programs just stapled together in a package
vs XSI's whole package made for one user mentality. 
I just thought quad draw had that feel to it.

I've not made any rigs in maya yet, and all my XSI rigs were pretty basic
but at least while I was rigging, i wasn't punished for something i wanted to go back and change in XSI whenever you learned something about your mesh you wanted to animate.
which the real benefit to the XSI over maya, it reduced the number of iterations in the learning process.

[Michael Amasio]

I'm still holding out that fabric engine will become a solution for rigging.  It's not all that magical for something complex in Maya.  Which as I'm sure several of you have discovered is a bit of a Maya problem. 
I can paint weights and build a rig in Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work. 
But when it approaches the quality I require, fabric is providing all the computational speed I need , BUT all that speed is lost as it converts data back and forth between data Maya can use and KL.   I actually get faster results out of the new Maya GPU accelerated.
...but faster results out of XSI.  Good old XSI.
I love it when a studio has like one license for XSI.   I always snatch it up and never turn my box off.
I've made a career off of lurking in the background making stuff like 5 times faster in XSI.

I know it's childish to enjoy, but I still enjoy a good rant about the pain of rigging in Maya.

[Sebastien Sterling]

"no improvement in the processflow for rigging in that much time, almost in any program"

This is very true Eugene, there has been very little in this regard, however it is also necessary to point out, that all the DCC's didn't start on the same rung when it came to that stagnation.

It is also good to remember how abysmal Maya's offerings where in terms of polymodeling before quaddraw, which is in fact NEX tools originally, which kinda feels like an amalgamation of both softimage and max functionality and philosophy

Quaddraw, is all well and good, but i suspect it may have some very glaring limitations, on higher polygon count assets:

I have a Tiger mesh i built, realistic asset 52 000 poly's, pretty standard to my knowledge as far as film and high end commercials go

I want to cut the head off to do some stuff, then reattach it.

already as i separate the head, and start moving it, there is a massive hit, every time i pick up the head hull, its like a full 2 seconds delay before it follows the cursor.

now if i try to use the target weld tool, (which is the Quaddraw solution for welding points) after reconnecting 3 verts the tool becomes sluggish, after five it become glittery and lags like a pig dipped in shit, and i have to delete the history... i have another 107 verts to reconnect...

i'd like to think this is all my PC dying, but the same operations in soft run are as smooth as butter, the frame rate actually goes up as i am moving the head around, which i find partially disturbing?. :(

i haven't had time to mess around too much with the tools in Quaddraw, however from what i have seen, they seem temperamental and prone to crashing, i modeled something up from a simple box the other day, reached 107 polygones, maya crashes to desktop, i turn on softimage.

I respect the functionality and ease of use they offer however, stability... as the french would say "C'est pas pour les cochons" (is not just for pigs).

PS:

Nice one Greg ;) though given the topic of this thread, this pic seems a little closer to the money.

Ou ! the Romeroe's are living in Ireland now, are you the same Greg that worked on Doom ?

[Sebastien Sterling]

"I'm still holding out that fabric engine will become a solution for rigging"

Here, here man !

"I can paint weights and build a rig in Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work. I can paint weights and build a rig in Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work. "

so you can build a Rig in fabric, as a generalist ?

can you paint weights in it as well ?

I too hope Fabric blossoms into the next era of DCC's

[F Sanchez]

Its 2016 already. Is there no other app that will ever take the place of Maya? (Besides a future resurrection of Softimage which is not going to happen. ) Sure I can use XSI when working on my own but if you need to work on site it will now have to be Maya from now on. :(

--

www.johnrichardsanchez.com

[Jordi Bares]

It may not be the only solution, it is really up to you.

[Sebastien Sterling]

Hey Jordi Bear ! what is skinning like in Houdini ? and have you tried Fabric for rigging ?

[Graham Bell]

Man I feel you guys’ pain.

I haven’t rigged in Maya for a while, but the thing is if you’ve been in Maya land for some time, then you kinda get to know how it works and get the best from it. Many guys like it, because they can get quiet deep into it, but like anything it’s not without its eccentricities. If you’re gonna keep on comparing to Soft though, then you’re in for constant disappointment. But holey moly don’t go near Max for rigging, imho. J

 

As Adam says, there’s been a lot of talk on Beta about the rigging and without breeching NDAs there is a desire to start addressing stuff. It seems the work on the parallel performance in 2016 perhaps might be the start of that. Certainly that stuff has gone down well with people.

 

On the modelling front, Maya’s been going through an overhaul in recent versions. Up to 2016 there was a lot of overlap between what was the NEX stuff and the legacy Maya tools, but a lot of that got fixed in 2016 onwards. Imo I like the modelling in 2016, it’s in a very good state. The improvement in the pivot editing alone was worth it.

 

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Sebastien Sterling
Sent: 24 January 2016 09:06
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: So.. Maya rigging is still a thing...

 

Hey Jordi Bear ! what is skinning like in Houdini ? and have you tried Fabric for rigging ?

[Sebastien Sterling]

I remember skinning in max, not the best but definitely not the worst, it didn't have any pretences let's say, you HAD to use vertex weight selection assignments or "Weight Tool" (envelops are garbage), and they had a very practical little menu for that, with options for assigning a few default pre-sets, 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, as well as the ability to copy/past values.

selection assignment is the slowest method, not great for fast turn around, but it is also the most precise method.

Softimage kind of had something similar, plus a really good smoothing algorithm, (is it just me or was soft's smooth weight function, the bomb ?!)

Is there anything like this for maya currently, like max's weight tool i mean ? and the first words better not be "In Bonus tools ... !" so help me god !

[Graham Bell]

I’d take a look at the ngSkinTools plugin, a lot of people go to and use that instead of Maya’s default tools.

 

http://www.ngskintools.com/

[Eric Turman]

I tried using that plugin on a freelance project with many characters that I had to rig and point weight in Maya. While it was much better than Maya's default, and I know that it is much better than what Maya users are used to, it still was horribly klunky and unpleasant to work with. I don't think this is entirely the developer's fault though; I blame the designers of Maya for thier corrupted workflow.

So, when I tried it last year I found it only slightly less awkward to work with but I quickly ran into many sticky points with it. So, when I asked the ngSkin tools community how to achieve some of the sublime workflow that Soft natively, the users responded to me with "why would you want to do that" and the like. So, no, I can not agree with you and recommend that plugin Graham.

Instead just use Softimage to point weight and <gak> write a mel script <gak> to  hook the deformers back up the the control structure...that was what I ended up doing and I was much much much happier for it.

--

-=T=-

[Eric Turman]

I sent this off a bit too quickly:

1. point weight in Softimage
2. export back to May via. .FBX
3. then make a .mel script to connect the deformers to you Maya rig.
   

On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 10:32 AM, Eric Turman <i.ani...@gmail.com> wrote:

I tried using that plugin on a freelance project with many characters that I had to rig and point weight in Maya. While it was much better than Maya's default, and I know that it is much better than what Maya users are used to, it still was horribly klunky and unpleasant to work with. I don't think this is entirely the developer's fault though; I blame the designers of Maya for thier corrupted workflow.

So, when I tried it last year I found it only slightly less awkward to work with but I quickly ran into many sticky points with it. So, when I asked the ngSkin tools community how to achieve some of the sublime workflow that Soft natively, the users responded to me with "why would you want to do that" and the like. So, no, I can not agree with you and recommend that plugin Graham.

Instead just use Softimage to point weight and <gak> write a mel script <gak> to  hook the deformers back up the the control structure...that was what I ended up doing and I was much much much happier for it.

--

-=T=-

[Adam Sale]

The one thing to note i have found with ngskin is it only plays nicely with . ma files.

I fear an .mb getting touched by it.

I agree with Graham. When we compare what we had in soft, we are always bound for disappointment. That's not to say we shouldn't be trying to push our agenda every possible chance.

I haven't rigged in soft since the day it was announced eol. My students literally stopped paying attention in an instant.

I just resigned myself to pushing into Maya fully. Too painful otherwise.

[Juhani Karlsson]

Sidefx is getting a lot of momentum these days. I think Maya will get serious competitor if and when sidefx starts to push the character side more.

[Mirko Jankovic]

How are they looking on character animation side right now? 

one of the problems with H is that they still have a bit steep learning curve which it self wouldn't be a big problem if it wasn't due to lack of free time to spend on that learning :(

[Sebastien Sterling]

I think the interface, might need a remelt, it is clearly not intended for the diversity of tasks you would get in a regulate DCC.

This said I'm not sure I want to see a hap hazard dilution of Houdini, into a patchum'up DCC. Don't get me wrong, i expect them to get there eventually, after all where does one go when you have solves VFX :P?

What i mean is, i hope they do it well if they do it at all, regardless of the time it might take. as it was never a complete solution to begin with, but what it does, people seem happy to report it does well.

[Martin Yara]

For v2014 and later I'd recommend Skin Wrangler, a pyQT+python tool that is pretty good for that kind of workflow. And for 2013 and previous versions without pyQT support, Max Skin Weight Tool, a mel script based on Max workflow.

In games, at least here and other places I've worked, we rarely use paint weights because it is more common to have mistakes and uneven weights.

Maya's Weight Hammer is the equivalent to Softimage's smooth weights, but way inferior and without any option at all. I rarely use it because it tends to mess up my weights smoothing it too much and using influences I don't want to. SI's smooth weights could work very nice selecting all points (ex: the whole snake model), while Maya's Hammer do some decent job only if you select the points where the joints intersect.

If someone at Autodesk is reading, is it possible to have Softimage Smooth Weights to be ported to Maya?

ngSkinTools smooth was nice, but I didn't get used to it's workflow. I may give it another try when I need to paint weights.

I found another tool called as_SmoothNearest that looked good in the video demo, but it ended up being a combination of the Maya's default Weight Hammer command and grow selection. And without using the normalizing option with a potentially risk to have 1+ total weights per point. I fixed that code but, still  not quite what I wanted.

I ended up writing a custom tool to use smooth paint for selected weights and lock all the other joints so it would only smooth based on the selected points deformers. Now with that, SkinWrangler and Maya's Heat Map, my weighting workflow is a little less painful.

Martin

[Sebastien Sterling]

Yes weight painting is bullshit for precise work, however if you don't have much time and you need it to be quick and can afford it being dirty...

It's been a while, so i don't remember, but is Soft the only package with a workflow to select the bone you want to weight to directly in the viewport? instead of scrolling endlessly through lists ? its kinda clunky in soft, (takes a few seconds for the selected deformer to register). but it works!

Does nothing else have this functionality? it seems like such a no brainner...

Maya is exceptionally guilty of the joint list scrolling, as the window is tiny, can not be resized (to my knowledge) and in spite of this, requires you to lock every bone but the 2 you are weighting,  manually ! forcing you to run up and down every time you need to change what you are skinning to.

[Olivier Jeannel]

Frankly, not porting Softimage beautiful intelligence to Maya is the only way to see that damn shit disapear and be replaced.

[Andres Stephens]

Selecting bones in the viewport to weight paint. Good old trueSpace does this. It’s rigging is awefuly buggy, and it’s weighting also weird sometimes – but you can weight paint directly by selecting a bone. I thought this was default for all software (I’ve only really used SI and trueSpace, blender) – lol.

 

Reading this thread… I didn’t realize industry standards were.. low.

-Draise

[Mirko Jankovic]

back in AD someone: 

"hey users are complaining about rigging and really after looking into it for a first time in past decade it is truly way fallen behind of any normal workflow...."

AD main guys: "wait is Maya loosing user base and money??"

first guy: 

"no, sales are rising, new subscription model that will will push down their throat will tie them and bind them even more but uses..."

AD main guys: "well who the F caress then.. F users... buy another half done crap tool, cramp it in Maya, call it development and next rigging step.. till the time they figure out it is another crap we will have more subscriptions in... $$$$$$$$$$$"

[Jordi Bares]

It is, only needs extra refining but I would suggest you look at it as more than just a curiosity, it has become surprisingly usable and although it is not perfect (certainly less painful than Maya anyway) it is something I would love to test properly again.

[Stefan Kubicek]

Does nothing else have this functionality? it seems like such a no brainner...

Maya does. When you are in weight painting mode, just hover your mouse cursor over a bone that is a valid deformer to the envelope you are working on, right-click and choose "Select Influence" from the radial menu.

Given that I see all the frustration in Maya users curing and swearing all day at work next to me as they use their tool of choice (well more often than not it's someone elses tool chosen for them) I usually side with the Maya basher's, but weight-painting is one of its rare things that I actually find pleasant to use.

As long as you keep the Normalize Skin Weights option set to "interactive" and limit the number of skin weights per vertex to a reasonable level (I hardly ever allow more than 4) I find myself getting good results very quickly. Weight mirroring but works well enough,

and I next to never waste time selecting joints in the list of the weight painting tool. Similarly, I next to never lock any weights, except on really hard and obsure to paint areas (oral cavity, fingers).

Just like in Max or Softimage, the default skin weight distribution right after skin binding can have stray skin weights from far away joints.

These can be hard to find. What I normally do is I assign all vertices to the highest possible deforming joint in the hierarchy (usually the pelvis, if any), then I go down the hierarchy and paint in the weights joint after joint. Within a day, I usually have good results, depending on resolution of the mesh and whether the face neede to be weighted too.

The only probelm I ever had with this tool was that it sometimes caused stray weights after undoing a paint operation, but it seems this has been fixed some releases ago, at least it never happened the last couple of years.

--

[Gerbrand Nel]

Houdini has this.. kinda, you select by weight on the mesh.
But it doesn't work with my wacom for some reason :(
G

[Sebastien Sterling]

Thank you Stefan, am glad to hear maya has this too. I could expand further on the list of things maya gets wrong in this regard, but my heart isn't in it.

Just tried modelling up a base mesh in maya, am starting to like the new tools, thinking this is not so bad... less then 500 polygons in, the fucker dies on me. hadn't had the reflex to save so early, lost all work i hadn't sent to zbrush.

am so tiered of this shit .... (head in hands)

[Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES II]]

Ctrl/Alt/S   will automatically increment and save. It’s a really useful feature.

 

I also recommend:

Preferences->Settings->Files/Projects->Autosave

 

On a similar note, I’m fairly old school regarding the file type I save files in if they are critical to production. Learned a long time ago that saving files in Maya ASCII had really awesome benefits. 1. It can be hacked (somewhat a meticulous process) to fix a scene that might have failed or to make a saved version run in an earlier release of the software. I don’t know if that trick works reliably anymore though. 2. It reveals a significant understanding of Maya’s MEL underbelly and the seriously complex graph node connections that can exist. I used this once to map the conversions necessary to create a Wavefront TAV to Maya material converter.

 

The downside to .ma though is that files can get really large. I’d recommend sticking with .mb if space is an issue unless you start to experience issues. Haven’t had a need to hack a .ma file in a really long time. But I’m sure there are still folks out there relying on it.

 

--

Joey Ponthieux

LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES II)

Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI)

NASA Langley Research Center

__________________________________________________

Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not

represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

[Rob Wuijster]

"

Haven’t had a need to hack a .ma file in a really long time. But I’m sure there are still folks out there relying on it."

Oh definitely!

Using (and hacking) .ma files is still very useful when dealing with multiple external sources. e.g. reference files, textures, plugins etc.
It's easy to  clean out certain parts of the file header, so you can have Maya open a scene without throwing a ton of errors and go 'belly up' because something "important" is missing.

Other than that, I do miss working in Softimage.... :-(

Rob
\/-------------\/----------------\/

[Martin]

Hi, talking about rigging. I have to rig a character in Maya, a robot that transforms in an airplane similar to the transformers cartoon from the 80s.

My client suggested me to use HIK as a base and I'm not quite sure how well that would work. (I've only watched some HIK videos, haven't used it yet)
Do you know any tool that can make my life easier? because I may need to do it with a few more robots with similar composition. It's low poly so I need something simple, but I haven't rig in Maya since.. like 8 years ago. So far I'm inclined to try HIK or do the old fashion style with default tools.

I haven't used mGear yet either, does it need to be installed to open a mGear rigged file? I don't think my client would want to install anything in their PCs only to use my rig.

Thanks

Martin
Sent from my iPhone

[Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES II]]

It (.ma) was probably the only thing I missed from Maya when I transitioned back to XSI. Well, that and NURBS modeling.

 

I should add, if folks get into a habit of using this practice to hack data into and out of Maya, one of the best and cleanest ways to start is to use Maya ASCII with the Export and Import commands.

 

1.       It will reduce the .ma file to only the things relevant that you choose to export/import.

2.       It will ignore a significant amount of the interface setup in both directions

3.       Exports are automatically formatted to be “imported”

4.       The redaction will make the MEL data easier to understand and more specific to your stated goal.

 

In general, once you get used to it and know what to ignore or be aware of you can manually generate .ma files to import data into existing scenes or use the exports to decipher the scene/graph structure. If you are curious how this works, create a simple primitive and export it as .ma. Then interrogate the file with a text editor. It will give a sense of how a lot of the scene graph connections are structured but without the extraneous scene setup data. Be warned however, never hack or manually create an importable .ma without testing it on a dummy scene. A bad custom connectAttr command can blow Maya up faster than the speed of light. Oh, the fun we used to have back in the day….

 

--

Joey Ponthieux

LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES II)

Science Systems and Applications Inc. (SSAI)

NASA Langley Research Center

__________________________________________________

Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not

represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

 

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Rob Wuijster
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:46 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: So.. Maya rigging is still a thing...

 

"Haven’t had a need to hack a .ma file in a really long time. But I’m sure there are still folks out there relying on it."

[Adam Sale]

Martin. Are you using mocap at all? If so,  I would recommend constructing your own simple FK skeleton, managing its joint orients carefully in Maya, and then characterize it with HIK in Maya before sending it to Mobu if thats a part of your process. 

I've never really thought about using HIK as a standalone rigging solution in and of itself. Is anyone doing this? 

Adam

[Sebastien Sterling]

Martin

Yes mGear needs to be installed on all the machines using it, there is also a difference in the installation process between OSX and windows, on mac you have to install one of the solvers manually ?

I just finished using it in a small production, it  is very good, latest version is 1.1

You have to add the metacarpal module manually, which isn't too hard just a matter of re parenting the different elements back into the hierarchy

Miquel Campos has monetized a very cheap guide to mGear, which in addition to breaking down the mGear work flow, also gives some nice rigging theory tips, if ever you where ignorant in such matters. This is all on Gumroad.

[Sebastien Sterling]

"Ctrl/Alt/S   will automatically increment and save. It’s a really useful feature."

Same as Mudbox, yes i know.

 

"I also recommend:

Preferences->Settings->Files/Projects->Autosave"

As great a source of system crashes and file corruptions, as of actual legitimate saved situations. i've had to disable it in the past as it would crash on every routine backup, as there was some plug-in it didn't like, or the sky outside wasn't to it's liking, or 42 ...

"Learned a long time ago that saving files in Maya ASCII had really awesome benefits. "

I always save in .ma, these are not benefits they are flaws

1 "It can be hacked" it should not have to be hacked, EVER. plus my CV reads BA HONS in Film and Animation, not ancient Sumerian texts from 1963.

2 "make a saved version run in an earlier release of the software." Gona have to go with, The software industry are Bastards ? inbuilt Obsolescence anyone ? Still i guess the fact this is even possible in maya does give us the lie from Autodesk.

"I used this once to map the conversions necessary to create a Wavefront TAV to Maya material converter."

Hi :) i'm an artits, i make pretty pictures , in spite of tools and an industry hounding me to an early grave through contempt and indifference.

Do you guys do much rigging at Nasa ? (this is actually a legit question, just as all this is not intended to antagonise you mr Ponthieux, just the musings of a frightened paperboy wondering how he is going to complete his runs now that his bicycle has been turned into snakes. )

[Cesar Saez]

That's the attitude...

What happened to this list? It used to be so good :(

[Eric Turman]

"...just the musings of a frightened paperboy wondering how he is going to complete his runs now that his bicycle has been turned into snakes."

hahahahahaha! Sebastien, best analogy so far this year.

=)

--

-=T=-

[Sebastien Sterling]

Sorry Cesar, am having an off day, will be better soon.

As for what happened to the list, i think it's name sake died (or was smothered with a pillow).

on the bright side, we learned, that maya has a method for picking joint influences...

some tips on rigging from Adam ...

that mGear is a very good solution for rigging...

that you can hack .ma files to fix your scenes remotely...

that Seb should stick to his Valium prescription ...

So yea lot of rants, but also some good info :)

[Tom Kleinenberg]

The version cross compatibility was always a pro in Maya. Don't know how it can be a con. We had a number of occassions in the studio we had were version locked because we were halfway through production and needed something out of a later version of XSI because riggers/tech guys were already playing around with it.

And .ma files give you a great option. You don't have to take it, but using that and Lightwave's scene files was always a winner to me, simply for being able to bring a corrupt file back from the dead.

I hope your day improves, Seb :)

[Martin Yara]

Thanks for your comments about my rig question. And no we don't use motion capture and I assume my client is using HIK for normal rigs.

Back to topic, I agree with Joseph about exporting selection to .ma file. Maya data gets dirty pretty easily and sometimes it is impossible to clean it. Here is where exporting selection to .ma comes in handy. We have a little script to do this and I force everyone to use it before delivering data.

Although not always straight forward, being able to open a simple scene in an old version is something I always wanted in Softimage. Every year I want to try those new fancy features that could make my life easier, but I'm stuck with a 3 years old version because the game pipeline is from 2 years ago.

Being said that, I haven't being able to open Maya 2016 scenes in older versions, haven't tried that hard though. I guess I'll have to do some ASCII edition of the scene.

Maya has a lot of workarounds for it's bugs and limitations, but to be fair, so did Softimage.

Well, Softimage had less of that but it wasn't perfect either.

Martin

[Mirko Jankovic]

But also Maya have MORE of bugs and limitations as well so need more ways around it too ;)

[Sebastien Sterling]

I wasn't saying "backwards compatibility" is a con, just making a statement about general industry trends.

The industry has always been averse to Backwards comp. cause its more work on their end, and people won't update with the same regularity. opting instead to bully people and companies to march in lock step with them. there are legitimate reasons for this, but they are seldom in the clients interest.

I find it difficult to re-conciliate having to "HACK" Maya files = feature

doubtless some AD marketers would disagree with me :P

Thx Tom ;)

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

On 27 January 2016 at 05:03, Martin Yara <furi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Being said that, I haven't being able to open Maya 2016 scenes in older
> versions, haven't tried that hard though. I guess I'll have to do some ASCII
> edition of the scene.

It's in Preferences->File/Projects->Version->[ x ] Ignore Version