The Tao of Maya - How You Work Dem Nodes?

Urzaz

As overwhelming as it seemed at first, I can get around Maya now. I can UV, I can model shapes pretty quick, I can make some hard surface hipolys, adjust normals, etc. Basically, I can do what I need to do on a regular basis, and quicker than I could in Cinema 4D, which I have completely forgotten.

Here's the thing-- I feel there are underlying concepts of how Maya works that I do NOT understand. Nodes, histories, attributes, inputs. I mess with them to get what I want, I delete history when things start getting messed up or I'm about to export, but I don't REALLY understand how Maya is using them.

This results in two big problems as I see it now--

1) Weird stuff happens sometimes. Really weird. I'll clean up some verticles, extrude and offset, apply some materials, and something happens. My extrudes are on different polygons, my new material is scattered around on the mesh. Undoing might help, sometimes it causes the problem. I can't seem to do anything without these problems continuing on this object.

2) My outliner hierarchy gets very cluttered with groups or empty objects or deeply nested stuff that seems to be useless-- I know some of it is leftover combined objects and *sometimes* clearing history cleans it, but other times it doesn't.

My goal is to learn about how Maya actually works, the "tao" of Maya, how it's intended to be used. I can google fixes for most any individual problem but I've been meaning to understand how the pieces of Maya fit together for a while now. I think with that understanding I'll be able to deal with these problems when they arise, but also hopefully leverage the power of the program to a greater degree.

So does anyone know of any good reading / videos on this topic? Possibly focused on how it relates to the modelling side, but if it's animation maybe that will help. I'm sure some of you guys have it in your brains, I'm not asking you to write a book or anything, but could you give me some insight as to how you learned?

I know this isn't an easy question to answer, I'm looking more for general advice/discussion, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

Bartalon

Maya is not without its heaping helping of bugs. Your experience will also depend largely on which version of Maya you are using. I find 2013 to be the most stable, least buggy version so far, although I haven't really given the newer versions much of a chance since the service packs have been added (though I am growing fond of Maya 2016).

Here are some loose explanations of your listed terms:

• Nodes - Any object that can be connected via inputs/outputs to another object. A node can be, but not limited to: mesh objects, joints, construction history, mathematical operations (multiply/divide), files, utilities (texture2D), materials, etc. Pretty much everything in Maya can be hooked up to something else in the Hypershade.

• History - The mathematical order of input/output nodes that results in a final output. For modeling, every time you modify your mesh you are creating a history node, another step in the mathematical sequence that Maya must perform to maintain the new shape. If you are satisfied with the current state of your shape you should delete history. What deleting history does is it tells Maya to "bake" all your changes (history) into a permanent shape. Making further additions to a new shape just starts the history over again so there's no limit to how much you can delete history.

• Attributes - User-modifiable parameters of a node. Example: polyBevel1 has a slider which lets you adjust the size of the bevel after the initial creation of that bevel.

• Inputs - The receiving end of a node. This information is processed in a way dependent on what kind of node is receiving it, then that node generates an output. A simple example would be a file node connected to the Color input node of a phong material, then the material being applied to a model. The final result is your model with a material applied to it that displays a your texture.

Weird stuff happens sometimes. Really weird. I'll clean up some verticles, extrude and offset, apply some materials, and something happens. My extrudes are on different polygons, my new material is scattered around on the mesh. Undoing might help, sometimes it causes the problem. I can't seem to do anything without these problems continuing on this object.

Your extrusions can change positions if you modified a history node that came before it, one which changes the vertex order. This is often why you can't add edge loops and extrude then go back to your starting pCylinder1 history node and change the number of sides (the mathematical values are changing). You probably won't often have to go back more than a few history nodes and adjust the parameters; usually you make adjustments as the nodes are created. So deleting construction history isn't usually a problem.

As for materials jumping around on faces, this could be caused by some operations such as bevel where new faces are created. If you have assigned a material on a per-face basis, when you bevel the face order of your model changes and Maya is trying to respect the material associations; what used to be face #255 may no longer be in the same location so it may be given a default phong/lambert, or simply be made invisible. In this case, just re-assign your material to those areas.

My outliner hierarchy gets very cluttered with groups or empty objects or deeply nested stuff that seems to be useless-- I know some of it is leftover combined objects and *sometimes* clearing history cleans it, but other times it doesn't.

I often work with the Outliner / Perspective viewport set so I can keep a keen [read: OCD] eye on the contents of my scene.

Depending on your work flow, Maya likes to generate a lot of excessive group nodes with certain operations, mostly from booleans, combining, separating, duplicating faces, and extracting. If you delete your history immediately after you are satisfied with these operations, most of those group nodes will go away. I wrote a small tool to circumvent all the unnecessary grouping that happens with these.

If you perform multiple operations that generate nodes, sometimes the empty (and hidden) groups can persist even after deleting history due to how hairy the node associations can get.

I don't have any resources to provide, but I can say that you are likely to reduce many of your problems with Maya if you simply delete your construction history regularly. I have a hotkey set to delete the construction history of my current selection (but not scene-wide). I recommend doing the same.

The rest of it, well, is just getting to know your software The more you work with it, the more you will understand how to work with it and all its inherent flaws/shortcomings.

Urzaz

Thank you so much for your detailed reply!

Maya is not without its heaping helping of bugs.

Yeah, this is a good thing to remember. Of course, it's sometimes hard to tell what's a bug and what's my own doing. Currently using 2015 for it's UV grid texture feature. Quad Draw is crashing Maya currently, but that's my horrible AMD graphics drivers.

Thanks SO much for the rundown/definitions. It seems straightforward now, but there's definitely stuff I didn't intuit. (ie, nodes are everything, not part of everything)

You probably won't often have to go back more than a few history nodes and adjust the parameters; usually you make adjustments as the nodes are created.

I have messed with changing history and having everything mess up-- that makes sense, you're changing your index of vertices, etc., so nothing works, I got that. Glad to know there wasn't something I was missing and *usually* you don't worry about keeping your history around.

I often work with the Outliner / Perspective viewport set so I can keep a keen [read: OCD] eye on the contents of my scene.

One of the first things I tried to do with Maya was get the Outliner nicely docked (Cinema has the hierarchy in the interface) and as I wanted to be able to switch between 4-view and perspective the solution I came up with was a Ctrl+O hotkey to launch it. The problem there is that you're not seeing it all the time, so I might revisit your solution so I keep track of when it changes unexpectedly.

I'll look into your tool, too. Been using Maya completely vanilla because there's so much I don't know, but that's something that would definitely save time/frustration.

The rest of it, well, is just getting to know your software The more you work with it, the more you will understand how to work with it and all its inherent flaws/shortcomings.

Yes! I guess I knew this, I was just hoping to speed up the process at least somewhat by learning what I can.
If I may ask, what kind of work have you done where you really had to dive into nodes and attributes and Hypershade, that kind of thing? Was it mostly making your own tools with MEL or is it just kind of spread around everywhere? If there's something I could do that requires more of it that would be useful for me, possibly.

Thanks again for you answer, I appreciate it.

Bartalon

Hey, glad to help

One of the first things I tried to do with Maya was get the Outliner nicely docked (Cinema has the hierarchy in the interface) and as I wanted to be able to switch between 4-view and perspective the solution I came up with was a Ctrl+O hotkey to launch it.

All of your interface windows can be summoned somewhere from the Window menu. In this case, Window > Outliner will create a floating Outliner. If you want a docked Outliner then you can choose the quick layout buttons on the left tool bar. You can right click on any of the layout buttons to change the preset (you should see Outliner / Persp in the list somewhere).

(The third icon from the top in the image below is the Outliner/Persp layout)

If I may ask, what kind of work have you done where you really had to dive into nodes and attributes and Hypershade, that kind of thing?

Generally (in my experience) you won't have to mess with the Hypershade very often for game art stuff except for specific tasks. A bit of custom node work might be required for making custom animation rigs, combining materials, or a few other things. It really just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Was it mostly making your own tools with MEL or is it just kind of spread around everywhere? If there's something I could do that requires more of it that would be useful for me, possibly.

Working with nodes and using MEL can be mutually exclusive, although you can control node connections via MEL if you wanted to do something like automate a repetitive node-based task.

MEL may be beneficial for you to familiarize yourself with depending on how in depth you want to get with using Maya. A lot of custom scripts can really speed up your pipeline and even help completely avoid bugs.

oglu

if you like to dig into the tao of maya...
here is a good blog... http://mayaspiral.blogspot.com.au/

and take a look at SOuP... those are the maya goods...
http://www.soup-dev.com/index.html

specially if you are a rigger or fx artist SOuP is the key...