langdon 03 February 2011 04:45 AM

we walk 10 feet above ground, cuz we got a reason:p

Yeah ;)

langdon Feb 3,2011 4:45 am

we walk 10 feet above ground, cuz we got a reason:p

What is the reason, it has to be legitimate not because your balls are… ya know !!!

If you hand sculpted a amazing statue would you give all the credit to the tools or the artist ?

RROCHS 03 February 2011 10:59 PM

If you hand sculpted a amazing statue would you give all the credit to the tools or the artist ?

I would definitely give all the credit to the tool. LOL. Just kidding. Okay not all the credit but some of it. I prefer to use a sharp chisel over a blunt one to carve the wood. Cheers.

RROCHS 03 February 2011 10:59 PM

If you hand sculpted a amazing statue would you give all the credit to the tools or the artist ?

try to hand sculpt an amazing statue with a bazooka.
Tool matters like the chair you are sitting on, like the office, like everything else that affects you.
the old argument “tool doesnt matter if you are good, you are good with every tool” is kinda limited to me, and in most cases is not true.

What you say applies mostly when you have 2 artists with the same tools :)

I’m a little late to this discussion. I’ve been using Softimage as my main soft since 4.2, about 6 years ago, and Maya as my secondary 3D software since Maya 7, about 5 years ago.

I know much more of XSI than Maya, but I could say that I’m kinda average modeler in Maya, I mean not that bad.

When I want to do in Maya something I don’t know how, but could do it easily in XSI, I ask some co-workers that are “Maya only” users, and the usual answers are :
- You can’t do that. But you could do this, then this, and this, and that, and that again, and there you’ve got it. Great ten times more work.
- You can’t, but there is a mel/pymel/phyton script that does that. Fantastic!, but as usual, some user has to cover Alias, and now Autodesk, poor tool development.

So it’s kinda frustrating to work with Maya. I could do the same work in XSI twice as fast and not necessarily because I suck in Maya.

I haven’t find 10 reasons why a modeler would prefer Maya instead of Softimage. (I’m a modeler and sometimes animator so I don’t know anything about simulation or things like that) And to be honest, I don’t know why Maya still has so many users.

What I like about Maya and I can’t do in XSI:
- Viewer. I think is easier to get real time results without having to work in your shaders. Simple and fast for a preview with simple materials.
- Paint Effects. Although I almost never use it.
- The default weights you get with smooth skin are much better than XSI’s. The weight tools aren’t.
- Preserve UV (since 2009). Although I can do something very similar with Gator.
- Load different versions files very easily, you can’t do that in XSI (you need to export it as dotxsi or crosswalk). Although last time I tried to open a maya 2012 file with maya 2009 I couldn’t. I’m still working with maya 2009.
- A few interesting mel scripts, but that’s not a Maya feature and I could do something similar with XSI scripting too.

In XSI I could give you a lot of reasons why it is better than Maya, but I’ll give you two that I consider it very important for a modeler:
- In XSI you can take a weighted model, pose it, re-arrange their joints, delete points, add points, and everything without having to reset it to it’s bind pose, or re-skining (re-envelope) it, or using 3rd party tools, and without affecting it’s functions. Maya will just mess it up everything and the Non-Deform History sucks too.
- XSI’s Move Tool is much better and intuitive than Maya’s bad copy “Tweak Mode” (I think since maya 2009)

Tools does matter.

Softimage is the best choice unless you need to work with a studio that has maya pipeline for film and such. If you dont need TD people for custom things you probably have a wide range of things covered with Softimage where maya will just show to be a pain in the ass to work with.

I wish there would be some real comparison between those two packages, and people would realize how far behind Maya is in almost all parts.

Like people would care about the results of a head-to-head comparison.
Look around the world, count the religious people and the amount of evidence of their beliefs and you’ll have a good idea about how rational people are. Autodesk knows this and they’re taking a good business decision of trying to revive Maya ("stealing" Softimage’s original team and all that). It’s what people believe in and that’s the god Maya. Unfortunately, in this case, Autodesk’s best business decision is not the best for us XSI users.