good to hear your side of it.
how would you rate messiah, xsi and maya in CA terms? i have much experience with maya but the whole rigging part proved a pain in the ass. Messiah is just oh so nice.
motion builder? any thoughts? i need something with good SBD and would love to have hair, that kinda leaves only maya, C4D and xsi, i heard that c4d has pretty shitty CA though.
Hair and cloth are quite nice in C4D, but the general CA is pretty awkward: tedious setup, very slow replay and no proper dope sheet. So maybe a combination of C4D and messiah might be something to think about …
XSI and maya are both really capable - imo too capable. While XSI is more accesible, both seem - let’s say - team-oriented. They can ultimately do more. Also worth mention here, they have large communities where you can find resources and assistance. Think of all the auto-riggers available for maya… I like Maya’s key / curve management, though messiah’s could be better with a bit of attention. You have to be a bit careful with the XSI bunch - they tend to scalp newbies, imo - and there’s an air of arrogance akin to once-mighty empires. Think of France insisting that computer-english be frenchified. (Okay - come skewer me! I’m in a fightin’ mood!) That said - they are a damned talented bunch.
I agree with you - messiah is the ONLY software that invites me to experiment. With all other software, I feel like someone is peering over my shoulder, waiting for me to mess up and then - everything’s broken. I can rig with messiah - and I am a -ahem- limited td. More important, a capable td can work with the things. Messiah is unique in that it accomodates both.
I have no experience with mb. Never loloked into it after hearing that you can’t really customize rigs. Good SBD - I’ve seen good stuff with messiah, though its certainly not an intuitive part of the programme. I wish Taron would finally come out and share his knowledge. He’s let a few gems fall already, though - probably enough to figure it out.
Hair is only a reason not to render in messiah. You can export curves and generate fur anyway. If you’re bringing it to LW for sasquatch, be aware that Sasquatch fur doesn’t “read” the motion from messiah. It needs a bone deform for that. My experience: so what. Longer hair with splines, or export a null and have the hair object on that. Works fine.
Hmm. /me wants to try something like this. One thing after the other. Let me know if you go with messiah.
ummm… you know ive been using messiah for quite a while right?
im just exploring new avenues…
Yeah - love what I’ve seen, too. Sorry if it came across otherwise. Just reacting to your exclusion of messiah because of haior in the project. Keep us up to date with your decision!
In the DMorph block, I can’t type in values in the Offset and Pause fields. I can place my cursor there, but can’t type anything. I can use the spinner to enter a value…but the spinner stops at 255…huh? OK, this sucks. I’ll have to use SaveMorphSequence and export from 0 rather than from 350. Then there’s no offset required.
At least DMorph detects the number of frames in the sequence automatically and Offset seems to work like you would imagine, although I didn’t test it. The difference between how DMorph handles file sequences and how Image sequences handle them is completely contrary to the “learn once” ideology. Anyway that was discussed extensively in previous posts.
DMorph at times looses reference to the folder where the object sequence is in. Once when I reloaded messiah did not know where the object files were and the morph deformation was not applied. To solve I simply reselected a frame in the sequence in the correct folder. Now here’s the weird bit… messiah also manages to loose this reference without reloading. In other words, let’s say DMorph was set up and working OK in the currently loaded scene, and then I browse in another folder for a texture map, then DMorph looses reference and the deformation fails. When I go to DMorph to reselect the file sequence, it defaults to the last folder I was in - the texture map folder.
I have not tested this exhaustively, but this is happening all the time. It’s not a show stopper if you are mindful of it, but it could trip you up rather badly.
I suggest that anyone using DMorph always first scrub the scene to check if the expected DMorph deformations are being applied, specially before hitting render.
while working on the lightbulb lighting test - i stumbled upon a crash.
I have a fresnel gradient on the base of the bulb for the steel look.
I opened up the preset shelf and loaded the ShinyTest2 preset and assigned it to the same surface, keeping my original fresnel node material hooked up. When i hit render, messiah immediatelly crashes.
another one. i assigned an HDRI to the environment surface and i cant turn the damn thing off! even if i go and select NONE for image! I also cannot change the texture to anything else, the preview sphere updates but the render seems to be using my original texture!
also, how the hell do you delete images?
Probably not a bug, but I like to have this changed:
It’s not possible to use stiffness for the anchor in a IK chain.
Its rotation is always “loose” and not stiff at all.
So the user should be able to control the anchors stiffness. 
/ Svante
Stooch, you can delete images from the dropdown-menu in the Image Manager.
Click the Play tab, then popup to the Image Manager, then select the required image, and on the 2nd popup with the image title on, select Delete Image.
This can also be done in the image manager while editing the texture map, although doing it under the play tab allows image management with less mess.
you mean the little popup? i havent figured out that one… none of the shortcuts seem to work.
p.s. does anyone else find it mind-boggling that the image manager is in the play tab? Instead of … oh i dont know … the render tab?
seems that most of the time I would want to manage my images while texturing …
Also not a bug, but…
If you choose “ACTIVE EDIT: All Items” for creating keyframes, then you suspect to set keys on all items in the scene. But Autokey will only create keys for the current selected item, bad, if I want that I would instead like to swich to “ACTIVE EDIT: Current Item”.
So Autokey should set keys like the choosen “ACTIVE EDIT”!
/ Svante
the options for renderview (window, viewport, text) doesnt get saved between scene loads. also the checkbox for saving preview image always gets unchecked by default. feature or a bug?
I haven’t tried it recently, but what works for me for some of the things you mentioned is to rightclick on the render tab and select: “Store all render params as defaults”.
There is a similar right-click item on the Render->Settings subtab, there it is called: “Use current settings as defaults”.
Maybe they are thought as global parameters?
Cheers,
Perspective view doesn’t seem to keep it’s position and orientation when going between views. So I set the perspective view to see what I want, go to the camera view, do some changes and then go back to perspective view and wham, it’s looking in a different direction to when I left it! V frustrating!!!
On an similar area:
Single, Double and Quad views store fully different views.
I’m sure this was done with good intentions, but 100% of the time I would prefer if it would work like in other software where you basically can single out one of the current quad views.
Or at least that a perspective view is the same across all three flavors as well as the planar views - that would make switching much more usable for me.
Thanks,
When an item is HardLocked (red lock in margin) I would expect not to be able to delete it… but I can.
Bug or feature?
Deleting items from the scene which have expressions on them causes messiah to crash. Crashed right while I was saving and corrupted the file - fortunately not much work lost. I must sort of guess in which order to delete stuff so that messiah does not mess up dependancies and crash. It would be cool if this was not as volatile and just handled gracefully.
