CA Rigging in Cinema & Maya

[AdamT]

Hi Josh,
I've never used Maya, but the people I know who've used both say that rigging and CA are much better/easier in Maya. Hopefully before you graduate we'll have fbx support :annoyed: and you'll be able to move your CA back and forth between both apps.

[LucentDreams]

To set up the exact identical rig take less then half the time in maya for me at the moment :( The thing people should note though, while its unfortunate that things are a little slower to set up (mostly because of little tricks and workarounds to get identical behaviour) I have been able to get all but one feature from Jason's Fast rig into my own C4D rig. So outside of spline IK, anything maya can do C4d can do rigging wise imo. setting up the skeleton isn't any faster really, its the fact that maya's bones are based on a joint system, where each bone is simply a connection between the joints, to have the same functionality in C4D you need to use nulls attatched to the ends of each bone and run the IK throught then nulls, setting up those nulls is the slow part, and while somewhat automated for SIK, its not automated at all for hard IK.

[jimarse]

Kai-

Is there any chance that Cinema could switch to the Maya type joint system in the future? Is it even possible?

I really like Cinema. But when I picked up the PLE version of Maya and rigged a character with reverse foot lock and spline IK in under 2.5 hours I realized what a pain it is to get a decent hardIK setup in Cinema.

3DMacGuy- The maya way of doing things will take some getting used to. We are very spoilt in Cinema when it comes to a well thought out interface. Rigging is very simple though- check out the video tutorials over at digitaltutors.com.

d

[LucentDreams]

2.5 hours? shouldn't take longer then that in C4D unlessthats including skinning to, but I don't think skinning is particularily fast in maya over C4D. As for C4D changing the bone system, I seriously doubt it and don't see a financially viable reason for them to do it. throughout animation apps its pretty divided as to which system is used. Not sure about LW but XSI, max and C4D all seem to use the same idea. All C4D needs to do is make it easier to setup the nulls for hardIK, I mean you simply add tip goal or add root goal using SIK, and can do the same for Hard IK ecept you then need to delete the SIK tag add a hard IK tag and then D&D the nulls goal into the Hard IK tag.

[jimarse]

2.5 hours with no prior experience in the application at all (plus following video tutorials). Compare that to the time it took me to go through and understand everything in the mime tutorial and I'd say it was pretty efficient by comparison.

Granted SIK is more involved and following video instruction is better than reading, but look at the difference in setting up a reverse foot lock rig in Maya versus ther hard IK version in Cinema. Stray's rig for example, while excellent, is way more fiddley than the Maya counterpart.

d

[JIII]

lol adam

Hopefully before you graduate we'll have fbx support

thats great.

really when you turn into one of florida's senior citizens it might be avalible lol.

[danb]

my personal experience with the two appz is that maya was a little easier to setup a rig. as for skinning i think cinema is easier. i find cinema's ik setup system "a little fiddley" as someone already put it. however the claude bonet tool is awesome and fast compared to maya's. but maya's got the attribute editor which can control any vertex's weight parameter numerically for finer tuning. i would like to see that in cinema someday. it takes some of the guess work out of weighting with the bone tools. also once you learn things like spline ik and wrap deformers you will be very pleased with maya's capabilities.

so basically i think you will do well with your ventures in maya rigging. its a good idea to get the gnomon dvd tutorials to help, they are excellent. hoped this helped and good luck at school.

[LucentDreams]

Originally posted by jimarse
but look at the difference in setting up a reverse foot lock rig in Maya versus ther hard IK version in Cinema. Stray's rig for example, while excellent, is way more fiddley than the Maya counterpart.

d

Yes, but I think thats a little on part due to the setup itself. I've matched Jason's foot setup, which is much better then a rear foot setup anyways and it performs identically. Only issue with the whole leg setup I use compared to jason's is the fact that I need to create a workaround for the polevector, which actually isn't hard, but still does take longer.

[3dmacguy]

Thanks everyone for giving me some insight as to what to expect. One more question...Cinema's SIK requires an auto-redraw in the editor to correctly update the IK. Does Maya do this?

-Josh

[LucentDreams]

well yes and no, it depends on how you make your expressions in maya, since maya can't do this automatically. If you want SIK in maya your going to have to make an expression that looks at the previous frames position, depending no how you do the expression it may scrub it may not.

[Stray]

My ears were burning...

Kai, have you checked out Westys up vector node?

http://www.linkclub.or.jp/~westy/

-Stray

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