So how much DO you know about your programs?
polycounter lvl 18
Every so often, I'll start fiddling around in 3DS Max 5.1 and find something completely and utterly alien to me, and I'll realize just how little I really know about it - and the same goes for Photoshop, and several other programs.
What about you? How well do you really know your program of choice, anyway? And would you reccomend tutorials, actual classes, or just fiddling around as a means to learn more?
What about you? How well do you really know your program of choice, anyway? And would you reccomend tutorials, actual classes, or just fiddling around as a means to learn more?
Replies
Ever since I switched to maya and started working on shorts I know a lot more than I did when I was just working on game characters and still I'm only familiar with a fraction of the software. I know only the basics of rendering, never touched any type of dynamics and only use polygons to model. It's near impossible to learn everything, and learn it well at that.
Of course it's always a good thing to further research the area's you are trying to master. As with anything, there's more than one way to get to the same result, and some happen to be faster, or happen to be able to create even better results. That's all software is anyway, providing easier means to a higher goal.
I don't understand why people barely even touch Softimage XSI as much.
same goes to yopur body, you dont deed to discover the halls of your stomach to produce a sausage for your toilet hehe
these two are an riddle to me
As for bugs, I'm with you Jesse on this one, Maya's bugs put max's to shame. At the very least if max crashes it'll try and save a backup of the file before it's lost (a great feature all 3d apps should have).
polyhertz...YES...i actually can't believe ALL programs don't do this.
I believe I learn something new in Max on a weekly basis
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yeah i gotta say i learn something new all the time as well or just another way to do something.
I also can't believe maya doesn't have autobackup.
Since 2005 when I got my 2.x ZB, I was on / off on the program due to complexity which most beginners might be experienced, and left it awhile on bookshelf. As new version arrived, more amazing tools added (which means the bar has been set much higher!), and more time I've spent re-learning. Especially, communication with other packages were daunting task...
Still I need to learn a lot more to rely on ZB in full scale.
I also can't believe maya doesn't have autobackup.
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http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/utility_external/backup/3962.html
This, to me, is exactly why Maya is so far superior to Max. In Maya, you can script almost anything. MaxScript is so limited because so much of the core Max functionality was written before MaxScript existed, and even now Autodesk does a piss poor job of exposing things to maxscript (some things will never be exposed because the people who wrote them years ago have moved on... "black boxes" of max, as bobo calls them). "I can't believe Maya doesn't have...
is usually solved with a trip to highend3D, or if that doesn't work, you can always write it yourself.
Its frustrating when the thing you find out about Max is what you cannot do with maxscript instead of what you can do with maxscript.
I for one think the modeling tools in max are far superior to maya. I can't make a reference copy of my model in maya and add a turbo smooth modifier on the top of the stack to see how it will look when it's smoothed to generate the normals and ao maps.
That to me right there is more helpful than anything else.
I can't make a reference copy of my model in maya and add a turbo smooth modifier on the top of the stack to see how it will look when it's smoothed to generate the normals and ao maps.
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Polygons: Proxy > Subdiv Proxy (Maya 8.5)
Autobakup is one thing I don't think is built in. then again I've rarely been able to crash maya. Its od, some people can't get it to crash, others crash it like a 16yr old in an f1 car. I have found a few ways, and usually reloading and deleting the history on whatever I'm working on makes the crash go away. I learned to periodically save from a long history of 3d apps, and maya does save a backup when it crashes, if it can. There are those occasional errors that just blank the program entirely. though I usually find those to be issues with windows rather than maya.
The help docs are HUGE for both max and maya, there is a lot to the programs. And like so many have said, depending on what you want to learn either just go and do and mess with things, OR pick up a book on the specific subject you want to know about. A book on rigging I got the other year let me know about some parts of maya I didn't have a clue about, and wouldn't have discovered in just playing with different animation stuff, since they're actually in the texturing/materials/hypershade system but are extremely useful to the animation side of things.
The scripting is really quite straightforward, if you've done any form of scripting before. Javascript even.
Polygons: Proxy > Subdiv Proxy (Maya 8.5)
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The main thing I don't like about that is you then have two objects in your scene instead of just one.
Also, why on earth would anyone want to preview a 2-iteration smoothed mesh yet render out the control cages? "High Quality Display" does just that, which means you then have the additional steps of having to disable the high quality display, and apply a smooth function to all your meshes. What a waste of time.
Whoops, turned into a Maya rant!
yeah the scripting is great if you know how. But seriously how many people here can write really crazy and helpful scripts.
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Well to that I say two things. First, any studio worth its salt should have a tech artist who can write helpful scripts, it really doesn't take a CSc degree to learn. Second, it isn't only the crazy scripts where MXS hits a wall, it is on a wide variety of simpler things as well (simply something as simple as getting the texture vert of geo vert is a pain, because Max did it a certain way in 3dsDOS and it is still being done the same way!).
Vailias: I agree completely as per the Maya comment. And I think the comment about using the Hypershade to rig really explains the other things I've been saying. (for those that don't know, you can use Maya's utility nodes in the hypershade(material editor) to do math instead of putting it all in expressions or MEL, making the calculations much faster and more robust (Given we have instead of a code, a visual representation). Max gives you a tool, bam, it is there. What you want to do has to adjust to what Max has available, which is why there are always new things to learn; Max's 'tools' allow you to do things you probably would have a helluva hard time doing otherwise.
Then I look at Maya, and I say, it isn't so much about giving you a UI and tools and saying 'here ya go!,' it is about process. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in rigging. Can you make awesome rigs in Max? Of course you can. But in literally a couple weeks of rigging in Maya I was making rigs I still cannot make after being a Max technical artist for half a year. Maya will give you different processes, different ways to use it, it will give you a canvas and options. Max: bam, here you go, use what we've made.
Of course there are new things people learn, especially about Max. Just read the Max reviews going back to Max6 or so, already they discuss how the program may be getting bloated. Well it has gotten worse every year, because Autodesk refuses to consolidate or refactor or rethink how to bring Max up to date. Maya by its very nature, being implemented almost entirely in MEL, is much more open and flexible. To use an analogy, Maya allows you to mix paints to produce infinite colors, instead of having to memorize the name and HSV of a thousand different paints that sit alone in their jars.
I'm tired of learning new features instead of learning how to do new things; the former forces you to march behind the curve of innovation, while the latter allows freedom to go well beyond it.
I'm not so impressed by an application where I have to learn the scripting language and write a custom script just so that I can set one hotkey to two different functions which do exactly the same thing depending on which selection mode I'm in ...
Whoops, app war...
In standard UI mode I try to get rid of as much clutter as possible so I hit the little grey dotted spaces near UI elements I don't need to remove them (timebar, helpline, tool palette...) and just keep the bare minimum (shelves, script line, top icons). Now if some reason I want to go fullscreen to use screen realestate to the maximum I use ctrl-spacebar. But if I then switch back to the classic UI elements, all the stuff I got rid off is back again, UI info has not been stored.
Obviously this is not something that a technical scripter person would notice since the guy is likely not to be worried by screen clutter. However at the end of the day, this person would have to write a custom usersetup storage system to avoid that one issue - which means time lost for other things...
I understand that this is from the limited, polygon pusher+artist point of view. But still! It is a valid point, since other apps do this kind of things better. The fact that an app is very robust and open does not mean that it is a fast and robust polygon editing tool.
Also, why on earth would anyone want to preview a 2-iteration smoothed mesh yet render out the control cages? "High Quality Display" does just that, which means you then have the additional steps of having to disable the high quality display, and apply a smooth function to all your meshes. What a waste of time.
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Or the alternative, have two perspective windows, one with High Quality Display on, the other with it off, and just switch between the two. Or (even better). Make a camera, aim it at your subdiv proxy, create a tear-off window of that view, isolate select the subdiv proxy, then throw that window onto another monitor. There, you can now work however you want on your unsmoothed model on your main monitor, while your smoothed model updates in your other.
I'd have to say that we have two completely different views though. What you dislike about Maya is one of the things I like. That if at anytime I feel Maya is not able to behave in a way I want, that I can open up the script editor, look at the echo-all commands, and possibly (given the fact I know very little about scripting) make something I need. Like my dandy mid-point edge connector (adds an isoparm at the midpoint of the selected edge rings).
that I can open up the script editor, look at the echo-all commands, and possibly (given the fact I know very little about scripting) make something I need. Like my dandy mid-point edge connector (adds an isoparm at the midpoint of the selected edge rings).
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Except when you ignore that both Max and XSI have this as a standard tool so you wouldn't have to do that if you weren't using a program that's lacking tools that are standard in other major applications.
Lacking knowledge about your chosen application can be a curse. There's been plenty of times when I've had artists approach me and say "we should get this new plugin because it has this cool feature"
...and the cool feature is something that's standard in the base application and they just hadn't found out about it.
Except when you ignore that both Max and XSI have this as a standard tool so you wouldn't have to do that if you weren't using a program that's lacking tools that are standard in other major applications.
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Please, I dare you to compare Max's listener to that of Maya or XSI (the latter only from hearsay). Max's listener is horrendous, because it carries the same problems I explained earlier relating to maxscript. Not only does it not record a number of actions, it often uses such an ass-backwards way of doing things that it makes practical scripting from the listener results impossible (often using completely different commands and techniques than you would actually use to script, especially dealing with modifiers, etc.). Compare this to the MEL listener... hell, it can echo menu selections, and I've yet to find something that isn't exposed to the listener or MEL (given I haven't scripted in Maya much but I always noticed the listener going when I was using Maya regularily... in Max, no).
Except when you ignore that both Max and XSI have this as a standard tool so you wouldn't have to do that if you weren't using a program that's lacking tools that are standard in other major applications.
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Can we perhaps, stop the "App War" thing, since its been done to death, and the fact that Max and Maya are two seperate programs designed in two different ways, to achieve often similar things? It would be like complaining that your Mini Cooper doesn't have as much storage space as a Ford F150, and therefore is an inferior mode of transportation.
Or the alternative, have two perspective windows, one with High Quality Display on, the other with it off, and just switch between the two. Or (even better). Make a camera, aim it at your subdiv proxy, create a tear-off window of that view, isolate select the subdiv proxy, then throw that window onto another monitor. There, you can now work however you want on your unsmoothed model on your main monitor, while your smoothed model updates in your other.
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Thanks for the suggestion, this is already how I've been doing it (camera copy, proxy and isolate select per viewport) ... again though this just highlights what I was talking about before.
Something that is one step in Max (add Turbosmooth modifier, then you can toggle on or off the smoothed result on a keypress), is about 3 steps in Maya and involves creating Isolate Selection sets which will then have to be altered as new objects are created, and STILL results in having double the number of objects in your scene (one for the control mesh, one for the smooth proxy), and requiring a 2-viewport layout instead of one. This is just inefficient.
And there seems to be no better way of doing it, without writing a complex script in a language I don't really have time to learn.
And, just to fix up your analogy a bit, it's more like comparing a car in which you press a button to get it moving then just steer, with a car in which you have to wire up the electronics to get it started then regularly reach down onto the dashboard to flick switches while you're travelling
Prof420: I've found just a few commands that have that problem in maya's script editor, but I was able to search the echoed output in the help and find the proper calling command. Also I'm going to be needing to set up a rig in max very soon, mind If I pick your brain for tips n tricks?
I do have to say I'm happy with the little things that script tools help.
I've been using maya's geometry sculpting tool a lot, and I wind up needing to turn off the wireframe on selected objects when the poly density goes up. The option for this is in the display preferences, and navigating there really breaks the workflow. So I just made a quick toggle script for it tonight and linked the script procedure to a custom marking menu I had previously set up and bam, one button wireframe display toggle. (I could have left it on the shelf for one less step, but I don't like the shelf)
More on the original question:
Know your app as well as you need to get the job done. I like to have a large toolset, and have been building things lately with what are more traditionally nurbs modeling techniques and tools (under maya anyway) (birail extrusions, boundary surfaces, lofting etc), but in a polygonal workflow. Understanding your app can really increase your productivity, but what really matters is your own methodology.
Much like I'll never be a fan of max. I'll learn it for sure, but every time I've used it it feels obtuse and hard to work with. Much like why I'm going to go for mudbox as a high poly sculpting app over zbrush.
I know enough about maya now that I work almost exclusively from the context sensitive marking menus. It has certainly streamlined my workflow quite a bit.
Best piece of advice was something I think MOP posted once. Observe your workflow, and see where you are spending the most time when you aren't actually making the model. Like what menus are you opening a lot of, what are you switching between a lot, where are you wasting time not actively improving the model. Once you isolate those things see if you can find a shorter route or other solution to do what you are need to do, but more efficiently.
edit: ok now I think I know why the flow is different on the turbosmooth vs subd proxy.
Subd proxy has a huge amount of options to it. This I did not previously know. Not simply subdivision level, but method of subdivision, whether to keep hard edges or not, how closely you want your smoothed mesh to follow the original and a couple other options. this is really going to improve some of the hardsurface stuff I've been planning.
Collapse works fine though, which is why I try to use it most of the time.
Also, applying a Smooth command to a selection of 12+ objects seems to crash Maya 2008, which is kind of annoying.
Edit: read a quick bit in the help, and I'd guess the crash lies in how the procedures are carried out. Collapse edge states that it works on one edge at a time in the selected set. Since that works while merge to center doesn't merge must do it all in one go, and the update loop fails. odd bug.
Can't find the routine in the devkit.. (not terribly surprising as its not a plugin)
Well that's the thing, and it's actually very related to the subject of that thread. My problem with Maya is that it requires the artist to know more than needed. The application is great as a pipeline element - I see how easy it is for coders to integrate it with other apps and tools. However from the artist point of view while still being a very powerful app it has serious flaws.
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Not just a pipeline where you have a bunch of coding slaves providing your every need. I was a pretty experienced max user before having to switch tot Maya in school and now that I've done some work on shorts I honestly couldn't even imagine how I'd manage all that in Max. I'm sure a tool like maya really shines in a full scale production environment, but even without any additions Maya is a hugely powerful tool for larger projects. The way the interface is entirely build around managing large complicated scenes with files referenced from all over the place, a ton of different camera's and lighting setups and the way you can easily set up your render pipeline just beats everything max can do out of the box.
But as you point out, if what you're looking for in an app is making just the assets Maya out of the box indeed is redundantly complicated. As just a poly modeling application, it's probably the worst program I've used so far (even though I still like modeling in it).
However, as soon as you want to animate anything, maya just outshines max in every possible way, save for the standard inclusion of a skin morpher equivalent. Although the interface is still much more than you'd need when just animating a character for a game, the rigging and animation system is just so much more powerful compared to max 7 (the last in which I used the animation system).
But indeed as a modeling app it's just awful and awfully complicated compared to max, and probably most other 3D software. In the end it's what you want out of the software, and how much you need.
Oh and with regards to managing large complicated scenes, as far as I can tell, Max is just as capable as Maya? Is there anything in particular you're referring to here?
is about 3 steps in Maya
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Or one step if you copy the echoed code from the script editor, strip it of any unique identifiers (or code it to rename unique objects) and assign it to a button. Then forever and ever its 1 step. But I think you would need a bit of coding knowledge to setup the isolate select.
Which is the one thing I dislike about Maya. That it doesn't save my isolate select default settings across scenes and for new ones, nor is there a way to set it in preferences. Show > Isolate Select > Auto Load New Objects should be either on by default or in preferences...
Oh and with regards to managing large complicated scenes, as far as I can tell, Max is just as capable as Maya? Is there anything in particular you're referring to here?
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The rock solid referencing system for one, especially in regards to characters. On the project I'm currently working on I've made quite a lot of changes (that most likely wouldn't have been easy to make in max to start with) to the rig while it was already animated in another scene, where it contained both keyframed as well as motion captured animation. Then that all comes together easily in the trax and much more intuitive graph editor.
The way the display and especially render layer interface is constructed, the latter you'd probably never touch while working on assets and characters. I have 19 shots in a single file which all have their own render layer and specific renderable camera assigned to it, with the frames to be rendered specified. They also all have different lighting setups since you'd want each shot lit differently, and you can basically adjust each render, camera and lighting attributes per render layer by just makin changes while having a render layer selected, or creating a render layer override.
Then there is the node based structure maya has, which comes together in the hypergraph. This is probably the most intimidating part of maya and I've far from tapped its full potential, but it is hugely powerful. In a way it's similar to what I believe was called the scematic view, except you have control over nearly every aspect of... well, everything.
Last but not least, the default way of maya handling eveyrthing as a project, rather than a scene is also a great thing. It seems over the top at first, but it does aid you with managing everything both for yourself, as well as when working in a larger team.
While I can hardly image max isn't capable of all this just as well, the max interface obviously isn't built around this concept.
Like pior says the learning curve is steep and maya makes simple and smaller scale things much more complicated then they have to be, but the more complicated a project gets the more sense maya makes.
And yes as a modeler maya is crap and I truly feel for you if you have to use it just for highpoly modeling. Just bear in mind that the little sacrifice you have to make translates in a huge gain for those having to work with rigs and animations.
For the record I always liked max a lot when I was still using it and on points would still prefer it, everything modeling related for one. I just don't like messing around with half assed and totally different interfaces to get something set up in a rock solid way, and while many people consider maya complicated, once you get past the learning curve, actually becomes remarkably simple to use, since basically everything works exactly the same.
The default viewport navigation is superb too ..
However i still feel it falls short in the speed and workflow as far is modeling is concerned.. I still feel like Maya takes too long to perform operations and commands and lacks a few fundamental mesh tools that i am used to in Max.
I mainly ask because this seems like a filet mignone and steak deal. If you've eaten steak all your life, you don't really know what you're missing until you have that filet mignone. Since I don't know whats missing, I don't know if theres already a script out there, or one that I could cobble together, or someone else write, to add that functionality to Maya.
connect
being able to shift+drag to duplicate a piece of the mesh into a new mesh or keep under same element.. ( maya has "extract" but i run a modification of that function that actually does it properly but unfortunately it's cumbersome and quite slow)
target weld
unversal collapse
selection masks not remembering last selections
These are things that i somehow found a workaround for .. but they are still not as crisp as they work in Max.
I also dont know whether or not it just happens to me but functions and operation feel a bit sluggish in Maya.
But my biggest beef with these issues is that sometimes i want a function to be smart enough to work in different situations ... Merge/Collapse is a prime example..
All of these issues might be due to a workflow that's very specific to me.. I dont box model much ...
The things I can't model quickly without are universal "Connect" (plus connect-2 and connect-3 to quickly insert 2/3 edges into a selection), universal Collapse, and a toggleable system of working in highpoly (High Quality Preview in Maya is *almost* right, but it won't actually render/bake with the subdivision, wtf!).
Saving/accurately converting selections would be great too, there are a couple of scripts I'm looking into for that now.
Target Weld is handy from time to time too, especially with edges.
So far I've got a script which does edge connect, but that doesn't work on verts, and isn't easily customisable to add 2 or 3 edge loops to an edge ring or arbitrary edge selection.
As mentioned earlier, Collapse is almost there but doesn't work on verts, and Merge To Center leads to crashes a lot of the time.
I had a script for target welding verts, but I much prefer max's target weld edge function, which I can't find a MEL script for.
I also managed to find a script which fairly mimics Max's "Create Shape From Selection" (for converting Edge selections to a new smooth curve), but it's very slow compared to Max's.
Some way of making a spline/curve renderable (giving it thickness) without using Loft / Extrude or whatever and having to make a 2nd circle shape would be great too.
So much of the time it seems that I need 2-3 objects to do the same as is all contained in a single object in Max.
My main beef with all of this is that I shouldn't have to go digging around the internet and manually installing custom scripts for stuff that has been standard for years (literally!) in Max.
Yes, it's great that MEL script is so powerful, but that doesn't mean you can give the basic poly modelling tools broken / limited functionality and hope that users will be able to script their own tools to bring it up to speed with other packages.
In addition to that, I haven't come across anything yet which you can do in MEL script which I couldn't have done in Max. And when you look at tools like Polyboost, OrionFlame and Switcher, it's obviously not a problem to all these Maxscripters making awesomely powerful tools...
http://draster.com/component/page,shop.p...com_virtuemart/
Learning on my own, I would come up with a problem ("make a pile of bricks") and then come up with a non-standard solution ("model individual bricks and use havok to simulate their piling up") instead of doing it all in the limited tools I already knew. It helps, and the more you know about one aspect the better you can deal with the others and create art that works between systems.
Learning on my own, I would come up with a problem ("make a pile of bricks") and then come up with a non-standard solution ("model individual bricks and use havok to simulate their piling up") instead of doing it all in the limited tools I already knew. It helps, and the more you know about one aspect the better you can deal with the others and create art that works between systems.
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That's how I learn about half the stuff I know. The other half is when I show my work to someone and providing a requested explenation of how I did it. Then after being laughed at for a while, I'm told how I should have done it and could have actually gotten some sleep the two days before the deadline.
You don't need to be an expert in every facet of your software, but you should be an expert in the area that you work in daily.
One mistake I've seen many Max users make is that they instal a new version, and automatically load their old plugins, UI scheme, etc. I've seen people running archaic plugins that provide functionality that Max integrated 5 releases ago. Also, by loading some custom UI schemes, you are closing off newer UI elements that would have appeared on your Quad Menu, toolbars, etc. But since you are automatically loading your old quads, toolbars, etc., these tools are inaccessible.
If I ever see a new button or command that is placed in a location next to other ones that I use all of the time, then I make sure to investigate it. It is most likely a tool that is related to others that I already use.
MoP, you should look into NEX.
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Thanks for the tip SkullboX, I already had my eye on that ever since I first opened Maya 2008, it seems to fix about half of the modelling/selection issues I have with Maya so that'll be a good start.
try these
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=69730
Alex
I learnt illustrator in about 2 weeks thoroughly. I had something to illustrate, many tutorials and the manual. Saved me getting frustrated or building up dumb habits.
Cinema 4d is the same. I'm still trying to understand how everything works but through having things to do in it really teaches the program through osmosis. I'm sure I have built some pretty terrible habits, but then, I've never met another human being who uses cinema 4d
Mop I like the split edge ring tool of maya it's similar to connect. If you use it with snaps it nice.
try these
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=69730
Alex
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actually i use Insert EdgeLoop under Edit Mesh .. but it's quite slow for me compared to max's connect and it creates the edgeloop along the entire edgerow instead of only between edges that i specified.
Adds an edgeloop/connects selected edges at their midpoint. Does that work for you Fuse?
Edit: It also has the strange side-effect that if you're maintaining proper quad topology and you select a single vertex, then run the script, it will chamfer the vertex so that the newly created vertices lie at the center of the previously surrounding edges.