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View Full Version : Skinning in maya and messiah

donShole
08-14-2005, 04:36 PM
Hi, this question is aimed at those who have compared maya and messiah. My question is how easy to use are the field weights in messiah compared to skinning in maya. My only real interest in 3d is character animation. If messiah can save me loads of time and frustration in the skinning process, it will probably be bye bye maya for me.
Suricate
08-14-2005, 05:08 PM
Hi donShole,

I don't own maya, so I can tell you only about messiah. In messiah, most of the time you just use bones, hold bones and muscles. So this saves you from the pain of creating vertex maps and makes swapping/adjusting models just a breeze. You only have to take care when modeling that you model e.g. legs and fingers spread apart to avoid any cross influence.
The only occasion when you really might need metaeffectors (weight fields) is when you want to rig a face using facial muscles. Then you probably have to use metaeffectors to control the influence of the bones/muscles and it can be slightly fiddly IMO. Also, when you have a non-organic character (e.g. a robot), you either have to use metaeffectors or model your character in separate parts.
svintaj
08-15-2005, 01:27 PM
There is no WeightPainting in Messiah, so you will miss it a lot I'm afraid :banghead:

/ Svante
donShole
08-15-2005, 02:10 PM
Suricate and svintaj. Thanks for your responses. Comparing apps is a pretty dificult task, so I look at specific features that I want/need and see which featureset best matches that.
FB_Turbine
08-17-2005, 03:14 PM
There is no WeightPainting in Messiah, so you will miss it a lot I'm afraid

There are times when it would be very nice to have, but I rarely miss it.

Give the demo a try, and if you really want to quickly get a feel for messiah you could spend $25 to get joe cosman's rigging tutorial to get a little more out of it before buying. http://www.cafepress.com/messiahtuts/533502 I'd probably suggest rigging2 to start.
svintaj
08-17-2005, 04:12 PM
I miss it very, very much!!
If you know how to use WeightPainting in Maya to get "perfect blended deformations" you will be frustrated in Messiah, I'm using Maya if I want 100% control over the bone-influences.
The best thing with Messiah is that it's way faster than Maya in OpenGL, you can almost have a hi-res-mesh deformed in realtime!

/ Svante
donShole
08-17-2005, 08:39 PM
Thanks for your different points of view and suggestions. I like to ask questions like this so that I find out about well known strengths and pifalls before Throwing myself into tutorials to figure things out.
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