Maya 2009 polycount wishlist
polycounter lvl 17
Sincerely, as a game developer I see alot of things that Maya could add because its very important to have these features (forgive me if there is, but i couldnt find).
- choose zbuffer drawing order on each object (or other solution that could solve transparency problems)
- high quality rendering supporting cosine power map (gloss), could be in specular alpha or a new node.
- Faster HQR mode.
- Vertex alpha paiting for texture blending.
- choose zbuffer drawing order on each object (or other solution that could solve transparency problems)
- high quality rendering supporting cosine power map (gloss), could be in specular alpha or a new node.
- Faster HQR mode.
- Vertex alpha paiting for texture blending.
Replies
I also want the old compass thing back and throw the new Viewcube in the garbage
I don't think there's any such thing as "ripping off" when it comes to tools. There's just an optimal way to do things given the current setup of a program and input devices, and many different people coming to the same conclusion is no bad thing.
Obviously it would be "ripping off" if they just directly stole the source code, but I somehow doubt that
Regarding stuff I'd want to see in Maya 2009:
- A DirectX viewport mode, or an OpenGL mode that isn't horribly broken on consumer NVidia cards.
- Basically everything on the list at www.ireallyhatemaya.com (except for the "resizing hypershade window" thing, that doesn't happen to me, maybe he was using an older version than 2008). Everything else on that site, I 100% agree with though.
I think Funky Bunnies actually wrote a MEL script to make it behave like that, was posted in my Maya 2008 questions thread. So it is possible to set it up to work in a more efficient manner.
100% yes, all the freaking way...
1) Only if its an option that can be ticked on and off
2) Gloss maps are already included
3) Better computer = Faster HQR mode
4) Yes
Also, yes to all the preview stuff MoP mentioned. I would like certain things to no longer be a mental exercise in precognition, thank you very much Autodesk...
1) yes, that would be much better.
2) dont seem to work in HQR
3) thats true, but i have a good computer for that, thats im sure.
I totaly dissagree with this one, and thats the good feature in Maya, you can select other objects until you are editing an object. Also I think that this is a Max guy who made this one, we need to teach him how to use isolate object. I have my isolate function in a custom marking menu, also "freeze selected". I think he´s trying to bring all Max functions to Maya, maybe why not trying to bring XSI, MAX, Modo, Silo to Maya, wouldnt that be easy? heh. Forgeting the bugs, some of the things in the list have their solutions, and some are because a Max user went listing this because he just wanted to. If i had time I would make my I hate Max list too... but yes half of the list would be much better to have, specialy that bevel one.
They forgotten to speak about the manipulator axis, you can't selection a vertex or edge behinf the axis X, Y or Z >__<... and you can do it in 3dsmax...
and other thing, when you click many time one the same face, vertex or edge, and there are lot of other faces, vertexs or edges, you cannot selection it... you have to move the stupid camera... and same... 3dsmax can do it.
Create a map, make the colour be the power. When hooking it up, default drag'n'drop will hook in the alpha, which won't work. Manually connect your r channel to the cosine power.
If it still doesn't work, your card is crap.
I've never had any speed problems with the HQ renderer, unless i have 10~20 2k maps loaded, but that would be expected!
1) A better implementation of Set Driven Key: Give us the option to make a self contained animation block for numerous different attributes across any number of objects, just like set driven key can currently with a few attributes. Make this block a node, that way it can be controlled by other attributes, or linked with other nodes (such as the blender node, or the filter node)
2) Group keyframes. I want to group keyframes...why? Because on certain animations I have objects that are keyframed to animate in concert, and quite often I will have to move things around, change the pace of this animation, or delete it entirely. It would be nice if I could just select a group node in the outliner and do that...
3) More utility nodes, and hypershade nodes.
Sounds like Character sets?
Indeed somebody who should continue to use his more trusted software. The reason this can't be done is the very strength maya has.
It's sometimes annoying that maya is lacking in the tools department compared to max. I'm pretty sure Maya doesnt even have a decent push or shell modifier equivalent (please point me to it if I'm wrong!). The problem I think is that former Alias never implanted anything until if could be made to work with the rest of the system, in the same way. Perhaps that doesn't explain why the target weld has been abesent for all these years, but might be why maya doesn't offer some kind of corrective blendshape interface like max' skin morpher.
I do like to see the reference system become a bit more solid. Right now it isn't possible to reference a scene with a proxied reference in it (like a character, or anything else that needs to be animated) and keep the animation ('shared edits') when switching from and to proxies. Since because of this all the seperate animation files essentially had to be 'unique' for at least as far as all objects that had to be animated were concerned. Everytime there was a new object that had to be added we had to do it with update scripts so that the consistency over all files would remain the same. This wasn't hard, but it is annoying when you have 4 people working on the same scene, and during production new objects requiring animation had to be added to the animation scenes.
anyone know how to do it please let me know
Pretty easy to write a MEL script to do that, on a User hotkey. I made a shelf button to do that.
Oh, and regarding wishlists for Maya, fixing the bloody layer manager would be nice. It's the most hilariously bad implementation of a system I've ever seen. You can't just slow double click to rename a layer, you have to actually go into a popup window, type the name, and instead of hitting Enter, you HAVE to click "OK". I'm pretty sure they couldn't have come up with a slower way of naming layers if they'd been actively trying.
It's clear they know a good solution for renaming, just look at the Outliner. Why can't they use the same method in the Layer manager?
And regarding not being able to name Layers the same as any other node in the scene, where is the possible "strength" in that, Skullbox? It's a limitation. If you wanted to control something via script, you could check its name first, then check to see what sort of object type it is... or only check a certain type of node for a name match. There shouldn't be any conflicts there. It's ridiculous that if I call a layer "highpoly" then I can't call a material "highpoly". They're completely different systems that are treated in totally different ways.
Modo aaaaaannnnnnd performance, performance and performance !
As long as they fix that I could care less about everything else, I've been working in Max at home just to get my fix because my 8800GTX uber card sucks with Maya. AWESOMENESS!! :P
Contextually sensitive hot keys that the user can bind. They have a few built into Maya but if I write a script I have to assign separate hot keys, pretty annoying.
The whole hide/select bones thing is annoying but I'm glad to hear it can be worked around.
Above all bump up DirectX support, I wouldn't mind seeing some specific viewport drivers written like they did for 3dsmax and the Quadro cards.
Actually they're both treated the same and are part of the same system. There's nothing from stopping you using a material or a layer to control a rig. While that might be rare, many of the 'hypershade nodes' are often used to create rig controls. In this tutorial to create a stretchy spline IK, the author uses a Multiply/Divide, a BlendColor and a Condition Node (all created from the hypershade) and to top it off links the amount of stretch to a material that turns from green to red when there's too much stretching.
Obviously I don't think layer nodes will be an integral part of a rig or shading network very often. But when importing/referencing any model any layer is treated like a normal node attached to the object you're importing or referencing and all the connections remain, even if you change the names of the objects on import.
It's just not like Max in that way, which combines seperate indepedent systems. A polygon object, a material, a joint or a layer are all simply nodes with attributes that can be linked freely using connections, expressions or constraints. If they were all called MoP, all but the material would for example have MoP.visbility. How is maya supposed to know which you're adressing in an expression?
I can see why it might not be desired to be able to have multiple names for different node types.
That still doesn't explain why Maya's interface for managing Layers was spawned in hell though!
Oh, and those << | >> buttons for controlling column width ... GREAT IDEA
Also @ MoP: To overcome the naming convention, make the names unique according to what you're labeling. So if I have two things I want to call 'plastic', and one of them is geometry and the other is a shader, I would call them: plastic_Geo and plastic_Shader. But yeah, what Skullbox said. On things I've set up I've had attributes on a control object controlling expressions using hypershade nodes to generate values for other attributes on other objects.
Bugo, heh, so you actually find these buttons useful, and wouldn't want to change them to a proper interactive smooth draggable column separator (like the viewport separators) ?
Because that's what I'm talking about, and it's part of my wishlist. Unless there's a special reason that these stupid buttons exist, and oldschool Maya users love them? Because to me they seem slow, outdated and unnecessary.
It's not only these, but general UI inconsistencies and poor workflows in general, like what I mentioned about the Layer palette being unable to rename on a double click. It's not like double-click on a layer is being used for anything else, so make it do something useful!
And I think most sensible Maya users will agree, that this sort of workflow improvement would be good for speed and ease of use. There's no need to overcomplicate things. So yeah, I think it's a decent request for a wishlist. I would like Maya a lot more if it didn't feel like its UI design was finalised in 1995.
I think you will see more DX support as Autodesk pushes game studios towards Maya, I wouldn't be suprised if there is a major support/overhaul of it in the next release or two. It is really something they need to add if they want to have as strong a games pipeline as they have for other things.
Most of maya's menu's and editors are indeed really poor, save for the graph editor and hypergraph. I also like how none of the menus, shelves and viewports align in any way that makes sense. It's kind of like an old city centre, where all the houses look different and are build wherever there was room. Which has its charms. :P
Still online at :
http://www.pixtur.de/text_maya_redesign.ger.html
I want a maya like this !
edit: Then they should give you the possibility to use the same full screen tab system on secondary monitors as well.
I forgot, maya still needs camera mattes to mask everything outside the camera's renderable area.
About that you are right, sorry.
Skullbox, The old city charm is awesome... in architecture...
yeah I was thinking about this so I went in and edited one of the init files to test out something more intuitive. all I've got's a slider going on, but it's already so much nicer. it's really ugly, though because it's constantly refreshing the modeling pane and channelbox while you slide
It could just update after you release the slider and there wouldn't be that problem, but that loses the interactivity.
Anyway, with the way they're doing things, just grabbing the side of the viewport would take a lot of work, so they're probably just too lazy to fix it haha. Maybe I'll look into it more at some point.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to release any of autodesk's init files, though - edited or not haha. So PM me if you want it, I guess. and I can "tell you how to edit it"
You can go to window->rendering editors->mentalray->approximation editor
and turn on subdivision approximation for the selected objects, but that's extremely inconvenient
My biggest overall requests would probably be 'edge constraints', vertex weld, and better soft selection, I think. I'd be happy if they gave us all coupons for NEX haha
a port of the NEX toolset into maya native would be good for a start - you shouldn't have to get a commercial plugin that is not available for all platforms/releases in the first place to escape 1996-style modelling paradigms.
modify>convert>smoothpreview to polygons.
You will have to export then undo, but at least its waaaay better than the the broken 'smooth' node. I am sure some smart person could easily create a one-click button for convert+export+undo!
Might also want to triangulate before export too.
Yes, thats how I do aswell, but as in turtle, you could just have an attribute (subdiv enable)
whoa, really? any chance you got a link?
I know you can C+drag to drag a vert along one of the connected edges, but a mass move along edges... there's not really anything that does this - although you can slide edges. Is that what you mean?
Oh, I'd love to be able to scale multiple separate selections around their local centers (rather than the average centre of all elements).
HOWEVER the latest version of maya did upgrade the gizmo/pivot system, big congrats on that, but they need to keep going. It now can align to the average of the selection, or to a face. MoP broke down the 3dsmax pivot system and covered most of the useful features.
Maya has started to close the gap but currently the latest update as cool as it is only covers the two options in the lower right column.
Most Maya users don't ever complain about the pivot system because they've never bothered to really use the one in 3dsmax. You never miss what you never knew you had. But once you know its there, its like someone takes 3 of your toes and wants you to run.
I really hope they continue in this tread and find ways to include the other features. They might think they're small and trivial and not as cool as Cloth or dynamics but damn it they're useful and I'd love to have the best features from all apps in every app I use, especially when they all come from the same company.
Worse even is that in pivot relocation mode (or whatever it's called, what you get when you press insert) you van only transform relative to the world, no other axis at all.
On that note, vertex lighting has a lot of issues which need to be ironed out. Vertex faces setup is particularly horrible and often bogs down a powerful machine with even quite low poly objects. I'm working on DS games for christ sake.
yea, but i cant find/output the command for it so i dont have anything to use as a toggle
what u use?
edit: argh, maybe i should look for more than 20 secs.. "toggleShadeMode;" for anyone intrested.