WHY must it be sooooooo complicated?

[coccosoids]

i'm totally with you on this one... i think maya is just there to sell mel or whateva... just a playground for software developers to pick on different shi**y aspects of maya and turn them into little gemstones...

to be honest, for the average user (also known as the 'artist') maya is like a fishtank... you see the treasures through the glass and keep banging on it to get to it... after years of effort you may dare to call yourself a modeller, effects artist and so on in the maya environment, but as soon as you turn your head all these 16, 17 year old kids keep poppin up with outrageos creations done in days in other softwares like xsi, lightwave - to name a few... and guess what, you're not 16 anymore... :)

i think that the reason they can't upgrade maya as about 10000 mel scripters, programmers, software developers will end up on the streets..

to quote smb on another forum: " ... like i said, you need a TD"

so in the meanwhile we just have to cope with it... sad! :(

[pigbelly]

could not have said it better myself
respect!!

:-)

/Tommie

[mustique]

I agree except the MEL part.
Mental ray is not so fast and easy as it's on XSI.
Renderman4maya as a default renderer would be nice indeed.
Even assigning image files to material channels feels like a workaround after using max.
Hopefully Maya will get a major facelift with Autodesk.
So we can continiue being mayachists...

[djorzgul]

you are overreacting a bit.

[sacslacker]

If you argued that it was not as integrated as in XSI I'd agree but your argument that it's completely difficult just doesn't hold water with me. You definitely don't need a TD for everything.

[floze]

I wonder how the assumption arose that the artistic part in the process of creation can be separated from the technical part. Less technical weight means less control and vice versa.

The treasure in the fishtank you are talking about is a very nice analogy: it is, like in real world, nothing more than an illusion. Only people who never actually had it in their hands believe it's a real treasure.

[Cometsoft]

Not everything in XSI/Mental Ray is so easy. Rendering displacements maps made in ZBrush are a royal pain. The time you save in that easily offsets the whole lightmap/sss thing.

[Chris-TC]

Not everything in XSI/Mental Ray is so easy. Rendering displacements maps made in ZBrush are a royal pain. The time you save in that easily offsets the whole lightmap/sss thing.

Have you actually tried it? You can even import ZBrush OBJs and have XSI set up the displacement automatically for you (in the displacement tab of the OBJ importer).
All you need to do yourself is tune the displacement quality settings and you can start the render.

Now of course I'm not a fan of Mental Ray's displacement mapping because it consumes memory like crazy and it's not exactly fast, but that's another story.

[Cometsoft]

Have you actually tried it? You can even import ZBrush OBJs and have XSI set up the displacement automatically for you (in the displacement tab of the OBJ importer).
All you need to do yourself is tune the displacement quality settings and you can start the render.

Now of course I'm not a fan of Mental Ray's displacement mapping because it consumes memory like crazy and it's not exactly fast, but that's another story.

Actually I tried it more times than I care to remember, both in XSI 4 and 5. Sure 5 makes all the connections for you which isn't that hard in the first place. The real problem is the seams (especially with ZBrush's AUV or GUV tiles). In XSI it can take hours to tune and in most cases I just give up.

I can render the same model in Maya with ZBrush uvs and get it right on the first try.

My competence may be questionable, but even the guy who wrote the XSI-ZBrush pipleline was complaining about the same thing on the XSI list. From what I've heard it's a Mental Ray problem that Alias managed to anticipate but that slipped by Softimage.

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