Messiah and XSI?

#1

I want to know the opinion of user that have Messiah and SXI, what are the best things using both, complementarities,etc.
Thanks
Andreseloy

#2

XSI and Messiah I don’t think are the best companions. XSI on its own has a very powerful animation set. And its rendering and shading system is also on par and exceeds messiah’s capabilities. That said the main reason I wouldn’t recommend buying the two with the intention to work together with them, is because they don’t. Messiah can’t connect to XSI. Your only real option is via .mdd export from messiah or pointoven. While functional, not the most flexible link. That said, I see no reason not to have both. They both are reasonably priced, and a task may work better in one than the other. I think rigging is faster in messiah with the same degree of power. This is all a matter of opinion and we are stepping close to the TOS of cgtalk here.

#3

XSI comes with Point Oven so the connection is there. I don’t see how the PMG plugins are any more flexible than useing PO. PO does the same thing (sends point displacement to the host app) and uses less memory. I can understand wanting to use XSI for modeling and animation with messiah since the rigging is easier to setup in messiah, then back to XSI to render. Or even using messiah’s unlimited render nodes to render out a XSI animation.

Maya also has a very powerful animation toolset with powerful shading and particle tools, and still messiah’s largest userbase is Maya users, so I don’t think it’s such a stretch for XSI users to add messiah to their toolset.

#4

I appreciated your comments and i will be interested in follow the opinnions of person like you professional artist!
Thanks very much
Andreseloy

#5

i dont see why would anyone feel the need to use messiah with xsi, xsi has pretty in-depth animation tools as is. Autoriggers, etc. just seems kinda redundant.

#6

The same could be said about Maya, yet Fred has said several times that the majority of PMG’s customers are Maya users.

I’m not saying I disagree, and honestly I always wondered why so many people use Maya with messiah when Maya already has great animation tools and at least one good autorigger that’s only 99 bucks.

#7

Thats how I feel. I can see how Messiah might be used on some level. It might be easier to work with for some than XSI.

#8

well I have animated a scene in messiah and render it in XSI yeah I can see some joy there
But I only done it cause I could =)

Messiah is easy to learn and get moving in and has alot of charm

BUT if you get into and want full control having everything in XSI is better workflow.

if toons are what you want Messiah may be great and be prefect
But again you get so much more control and alot of little bits of joy with rigging and animating AND rendering all in XSI.

If you got the money I may go for just XSI and maybe get XSI ess instead
OR just get Messiah and learn it render engine and or get a Cheap copy of LW or C4D ?

Buying both XSI and Messiah is alittle of a waste, but I don’t see a clear reason to do it ?

I mainly rig and expanded to afew apps as my LW clients crossed over.

#9

In regards to the cheap copy of LW. You can get version 9 for $396 from Kurv using the competitive upgrade which almost everyone should be eligible for somehow.

#10

actually the general consensus is that xsi is a stronger animation package then maya. I use maya and i can see how messiah workflow can benefit it. Although its not really critical and with a customized interface might also become redundant. the keyword here is customized :slight_smile:

the GATOR system in XSI is what really mzkes it badass IMO.

#11

Wasn’t a GATOR equivalent added in Maya 8?

#12

A weak GATOR wannabe was added to Maya 8.

I agree XSI’s animation tools are stronger than Maya’s, but not by much. And I still don’t think there’s any reason to use messiah with Maya unless it’s just a personal preference or you don’t want to deal with the pain of rigging in Maya. The same is true of XSI.

#13

heh so far the rigging with xsi wasnt much of a pain for me. The built in autorigger is nice for quick and dirty work, then of course when you throw gator into the picture, rigging could be almost fun :slight_smile:

#14

Hey guys, this is me getting out of my cave and sharing a bit of opnion witht the rest of the world :slight_smile: I work with XSI most of the time, alone with LW, Modo, Messiah, Maya and even houdini, what ever it takes to get the job done. Yeah PointOven is a readGreat helper, so is FBX and collada :smiley:

So why would anyone want messiah along with XSI! it does sound redundent sure, but sometimes doing stuff in XSI is just a killer. one of the main problems in XSI is stability. Somewhere along the tranisition from SI3D to XSI something must have fell from the code, because XSI is not stable at all, and what makes it worse is that during the transition periode and while XSI was first a joke (ver 1.0 up till 2.1) big studios stopped relying much on XSI and switched mostly to maya, that caused allot of problems for SI since they stopped getting big studios bug reports and user feedback. if you compare the stability of SI3D and XSI the latter looses big time, it doesn’t even stand a chance infront of the complex huge stuff SI3D used to handle.

Now XSI offers alot of great features. over other packages of course, but it looses alot also. mainly what makes XSI great is the workflow. it has the best workflow ever to get things done FAST. not on the long run though or for complex scenarios. SI people thought about everything for the workflow, it’s just fluid. for an example, Constraints. It’s so easy to implement, rearranged, edited, muted, shared…etc, but it’s limited when it comes to layering them togather. and hitting a cyclic check is always the first thing you get before even trying your system. Thus the Modeling, Shape animation, Animation and secondary modes is a great helper, and IT DID HELP alot in solving alot of the bumps we used to come across, it’s still has it’s faults. now if you want to compare the fast use of such techniques with messiah then yes messiah will loose.

so what makes messiah a choice. simple! Speed. Messiah is faster than XSI, and more stable I’m afraid. now for cartonney characters or not? well that depends on how much your going to persue the application and demand raw power from it. So what speed I’m talking about it here? it’s how fast the application interacts with you, the speed of the viewport, openGl…etc. Messiah is simply faster, thus it gives you more time to animate and tweak that motion, and experimnent more than you do in XSI. Now don’t get me wrong, there are many ways to go around this in XSI, you can revert to layering, digital assets, proxies, resolution characters. it all depends on how much slow is your scene plus how much you need to see while animating. Buttom line is, if you want to just animate and feel free, messiah is worth it, especially if you want to express your self more with complex character and don’t want to do a flipbook every couple of moves :slight_smile:

So what about stability in XSI. well this is one of the things we ran into alot almost in any production, we think we nailed that pitfall and learned ower lessons but it keeps coming up again and again. For instance, the AutoRigger. well that’s one fast way to rig an advanced rig in no time, then it comes the animation stage. the more you tweak your character, the more it breaks. one of the areas that your sure to flip on you and break everything for you is the shoulders. now the autorigger comes with Synoptic view, like Armetures. it’s nice and great. but don’t freezeModel your object, or change hirarachy to it, because it will simply break and you wont have that window again. stipping down information and making a clip out of it is also a big hassle and very good technical skills to find and solve the problem, most of the time it works with a workaround. Scripts are also nice, and Scripted Operators is even better, untill you handle your character to an animator and he starts screaming when they break up, it happens, they might click something that irritates the Scripts and there you go, start debugging. I can go on and on for hours here, the buttom line is, every software has it’s pitfalls and XSI has it’s good share of them. so the other buttom line, yes messiah is a good plus if you want to animate and not worry about that kind of technical problems and trouble shooting.

quiet honestly both programs are good, and yes Messiah looses alot of features commpares to messiah, but even XSI ess. unless you have the advanced version, where you get Syflex. Hair and Behavior. but belive me guys, Syflex have more problems than you can imagine. sometimes I forget it’s a bless and I start to think it’s a mess. the Maya version is alot more faster. stable and reliable and it get things done faster in the end. as for Cloth, it’s nice :smiley: JoeAlter is happy, and you get hair. on time I was doing hair for a character, and I spent alot of time fixing it, building the effect system. praying it wont crack and the hair jumps. once I was done, saved it as a model and loaded it in the main scene. wait a minute why the hair is 10 meters away from the character? well the problem was with XSI 5.0 and if you don’t have a maintance contract like me I had to wait for XSI 5.1 to solve it. since it was a bug. then again when XSI 5.1 came out, all my renders had black holes in them and I had to change the lighting, remove FG or Area lights since they are a big cause of those, untill they released XSI 5.11 which they said it solved it, but you had to recomplie all your shaders to the new ones, of course that was a lie beacuse the problems stayed there and of the community memebers traced the problem to an antialiasing issue with mentalRay and wrote a lens shader to fix it, not SI folks :smiley:

Anyway enough about me and my problems, I’ll stop nagging now and crowl back to my cave and trouble shoot some more :slight_smile: Hope this wasn’t a long meaningless post and people actually gained something from it.

Cheers

I3D

#15

wow where were you a month ago when i was researcing xsi, thanks alot for that info. Much appreciated. In the end i decided to stick with maya as my main program at this point and now after reading your thoughts im glad i made that choice. One thing i did notice when comparing those two programs was that indeed the cloth implementation seemed to work much better for me in maya. I just wish maya had a better integration with mentalray, it just drops out on me all the time for no reason until i erase my prefs… wtf

#16

Stooch don’t you think Maya is extremely slow compared to Messiah? I have been animating in Maya this whole week and I have a framerate between 4 and 12 fps. I have to render previews all the time, this is even a non smoothed “lowpoly” character and Maya crawls!? (Using a Skeleton Pro rig) In Messiah that character would play in realtime, even if it was smoothed!

/ Svante

#17

Yes it is slow. I am used to playblasting though and not really willing to trade the features i want for speed. Believe me, ill use any excuse to use messiah but alot of times the pragmatic side wins out. Hence you see me here all the time :wink:

one way to get somewhat useable speed is to heavily rely on layers and proxy base mesh, the smoothed version is usually off but its still no messiah thats for sure.

#18

well you pretty much nailed it there I3D :thumbsup:

But I think XSI on my system IS the most stable software i have ever seen.
It does Crash but when you load up it asked do you want to load the errored scene YES Bang you back where you where.
I keep thinking that error scene load thing isn’t going to work soon,. but it just keep work prefectly.

and let not forget Messiah has it’s bugs too :rolleyes:

and all the autorig comments Yeah auto rig is a autorig, custom rigs are always going to be far better , auto rigs are great when you only want to spend alittle as much on the character at hand, or get it to setup the basic’s and then you rebuild what you want/need on top.

I know guys that use that autorig for Main characters. I simple would never do that, if you speading more then a week on a animation, you should spend a day or 2 on rigging
a rig in afew mins whatever system you uses, your bound to run into problem with the rig down the line. ( Tho Cat may change my mind there )

the differents between Messiah and XSI is all "under the hood " feature wise and face value workflow they are pretty even, but when you do a job and get dirt all the openess of XSI shines and all the little things are easier and all those little things end up amounting to some real goodness :thumbsup:

#19

i barely used xsi, just to test and do some tutorials and it crashed probably atleast 5 times. Thats from a cursory use, nothing hardcore. so yeah, not very stable. it just closes with no warnings error dialogs, nothing. just kinda poof and its gone…

and about autorigs, yes they are autorigs. no you probably dont want to rely on an autorig all the time, but there have been many instances in my past projects where i sure could have used one to get a character out quick. sometimes you dont have a week to animate. also often for print work you just want to pose a character, so whats the point in making a whole custom rig??? Also, xsi autorig system makes a character that is setup for NLA. So far it has been a real pain in the ass to get NLA to work in messiah for me.

in general, both maya and xsi give you the power to create a custom rig and then use some readily available example scripts to automate your custom rig creation based on template objects :wink: can messiah do that? it sure would be nice…

#20

Thanks T4D and stooch for your replys and comments :slight_smile:

I just want to be clear on one thing, I wasn’t emplying that messiah is better than XSI, not at all T4D, my point was that even all mighty XSI has issues and problems and thus messiah users should be aware that they are not alone in the buggs planet. XSI even has it’s short comings and announced features that never seen the light even after 3 years, like the directional displacement feature :smiley:

As for AutoRig, I totally agree with you, but that was another point I wanted users here to be aware of, because I keep hearing alot about XSI AutoRig and in other packages, and pmg people are getting the heat because of that, but you explained it far better than I did of it’s uses, so again messiah dudes don’t feel bad. Spending time to rig your own character and making sure it will actually work and hold till the end of the production is more important than an AutoRigger.

The workflow of XSI is like I said in my previews post and you confirmed is better than any other program, even for Maya. the only program that beats it is Houdini, but then again we need a fluid workflow with simplicity, and that’s somethings that houdini offers with years of experience and not out of the box like XSI does. As for stability, well sure it’s stable to a point, and thats for all the above reasons and this one is the reason why it’s the main package and not another one in my company, still though it does have it’s shortcoming and people should be aware of.

So what is the whole point of explaining how buggy or unreliable xsi is? simply to make everyone here who gave up on messiah to know that with all XSI pitfalls and problems we still rely on it in production, so does messiah. No package is error free, at the end of the day the client doesn’t care how buggy your package is, he just wants it done, sure it would be great to have error free program and full featured, but the reality is it’s not and we just have to make the best out of it, push it really till it cracks, and when it does, find a workaround…etc

stooch, MentalRay is a very good renderer, but the integration in Maya is very poor for starters, and in XSI it has it’s shortcomings also, more than you can imagine :slight_smile: if you want a solution to your problem I would strongly recommend RenderMan for Maya, it’s scaled down version of the RenderMan Artist Tools, now to be named RenderMan Studio. It’s not expensive, about a $1000, it has very few limitations, but the one that will cause you pain is the Multiprocessor issue, but that’s going to be solved now PRman finally supports multiprocessot rendering. So why RenderMan instead of MentalRay? it’s very simple, it’s alot more faster in almost everything. Three main reasons why RenderMan is still the most widely used renderer for all feature films, First is that before any new version of RM is out, Pixar used it heavily in production for a short movie first then more on a feature film. once the film is over and the version is tested enough, it’s out for publlic, so you know it’s going to work and you know it’s not going to crack on you. Second and third is the MotionBlur and DOF, I would suggest you download the evaluation copy from pixar and test those features against MentalRay or any other renderer, trust me you’ll be amazed of the speed even with a single processor. now of course there are other features like Displacements, don’t make me start with MentalRay endless try on that one :slight_smile: As for how tight the integration with Maya is? it’s far more superior than MentalRay that’s for sure, and it brings it’s own workflow techniques alos.

Anyway, I’m not going to start another topic and hijack this thread, if you want more info you can pm me and I’ll gladly answer any question. as for now I’ll work on my reply short messages techniques :slight_smile:

Thanks again guys and have a nice weekend :slight_smile:

Cheers

I3D