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What’s the difference between a Character Set and an Asset?
Posted: Oct 03, 2009
Category: Assets, Autodesk Maya
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I haven’t written much technical about Maya in a while and this question by T. I. Burbage on Steven’s Creating and Managing Assets was one that stood out to me as a good place I could offer some insight.

 

At a high level, Character Sets (aka Character Nodes) and Assets are the same. They both provide a simplified interface to other nodes.

 

The big complaint I hear about Character Sets (CS) is how the connections are made. Take this example of a cube. You get connections from the transform to the CS and back. In the Channel Box, the transform attributes on pCube1 all have connections so it can be tricky to tell what kind of animation is happening (Constraint? Keys? Expression?). You have to look at the Inputs, the CS, to tell (in this case TX is keyed and TY has an expression).

 

 

 

The main difference, and advantage with Assets over Character Sets, is the flexibility and additional controls Maya makes available for controlling your set-up.

 

Now, if we look at the same example of a cube, but as an Asset, we can see some differences.

 

It may be arguable but I think the graph looks a bit cleaner with Assets, especially if you have the Container collapsed (I’ve left it open here for clarity). The big thing is that the connections are different; the connections don’t go two ways like they do with a CS and this means that if you look at the Channel Box, it’s clear what kind of data is associated with each channel (Keys on TX, Expression on TY). I also like that when adding a node to a container, the shape nodes go by default - again, I think this makes the graph a bit cleaner. In terms of editing the attributes, Assets and CS both allow you to change values on either side of the connection, but the Asset really keeps the display more clear.

 

You should notice that the Container has the cube as an input – it’s opposite with the CS example as the CS is the input. The container is actually an output of the cube but Maya has a Channel Box option, under the Show menu, to put Assets at the top. Think of this as a way to reinforce  that an Asset is a high level view of more complex data.

 

 

One of the things I’ve done with the Asset, is to publish the Translate attributes’ names as Move. This is much easier to do with Assets than with CS. And if you don’t like the name Move, you can easily change it to something else after the fact.

 

Where the real power comes in with Assets is the Template files. As you build up the interface, you can save that to a file and reuse it. When you’re rigging a hand, you’ll usually do it the same so why not reuse what you’ve done before?

 

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Posted by mogkc on Nov 22, 2009 at 12:05 PM
thanks for the info - as we develop new things in Maya, if they make older functionality obsolete, we do thing about removing the older functionality, or making it less prominent so that it's more clear what the preferred/recommended way is.
Posted by blade33ru on Nov 22, 2009 at 11:21 AM
yeah i think thats more what i'm trying to say and evolution is good. for me one of the problems with max for example is it has so many old tools which are still there and many ways to do the same thing rather than 1 right way. its the number 1 reason i dont return to max no matter how many cool new tools are added.

im a teacher on the side and taught max for 4 years and now maya for a few years too hence my concern about keeping things as simple as possible

Posted by mogkc on Nov 22, 2009 at 10:23 AM
Characterize works on the joint hierarchy so it should work independently of Assets.
Posted by mogkc on Nov 22, 2009 at 10:19 AM
I look at it more as the evolution of Maya. We could not get rid of character sets altogether as some people are still using them in their pipeline. That's not to say that there may be things we should remove in the future to simplify the UI. Feedback on that is welcome.
Posted by blade33ru on Nov 22, 2009 at 09:34 AM
on another note....can you characterize an asset?