Huge,old,time killer tasks, and tips

[creativeuser]

Hi, I post this in multiple forums to gain some visibility... the real rarget are the guys at autodesk.

IDEAS:

• The WORST and most common and most HATED task: fix the way joints bend the geometry! We must do that for every elbow, every knee, spend hours and yet have a good but not so realistic result !
  Here is my idea:
  When a vertex meet another one or the face, it just stand still(relatively to the joint), just like it happend in real life. And it doesnt have to be a physical simulation like for ncloth, Just when they "touch" eachother they stand still(the vertex of the line of bending are no more attracted to the joint center, like happend now, and the external vertex bends the old way). I hope its clear.

• UV minimum distance: This could be all you have to do after an automatic UV mapping. While theres already tools to not make UVs overlap, this tool should set the minimum distance between UVs in the UV editor. And the UVS that are not that close to the neighbours, they remain untouched or scaled bigger. The "release" tool could help in this but its still manual and unprecise.

• The Size Object Reference: An object (like a cube or a line(like the distance tool)) that set a reference size. The object (if set) give the size in our scene of 1 inch or 1 foot or 1 meter. This not only could help us to model, but can also give reference to maya and plugins. For example could automaticly set parameters for procedural textures, mentalray materials, light, physical simulations, and other... a new generation of apps...

• 3D to bump: We model a surface and this tool create a gray scale map of it, to use as bump map / displacement / normal map. Because sometime we need to make detailed bump map, that is difficult to make in 2d... and it must be a map, you know. So this is like a render of the 2D view port but gives a different result.

• Two bump maps for regular materials, just like some MentalRay material. Its useful !

TIPS:

• Presets, everywhere! Also useful in MentalRay materials.
• More procedural textures and bumpmaps.
• Fix the physicalsunandsky brightness problem ! (you know what i am talking about)
• Better GPU use(also for common video card).
• Two way constraints.
• Brail tools often doesnt work you have to spend lot of time to fix.
• User friendly batch render.

[joojaa]

• UV minimum distance:

this is easy to script so no need to ask this of autodesk, This script rpobably allready exyist tough so search.

• The Size Object Reference

Same as UV you can have thsi today, NO problem.

• 3D to bump:

You have this, i did this as far back as in maya 3 or 4 with particle expressions, later with shaders nowdays you do this:

[ul][li]make a sphere[/li]
[li]make a copy subdivide it.[/li]
[li]Sculpt with artisan (rmb -> paint -> sculpt)[/li]
[li]go to [rendering] lightning/shading-> transfer maps.

• choose displacement map (bump and displace is the same)
• hit bake and close (if you wnat bump connect the map to bump)

[/li]
[li]Done[/li]
[/ul]

• Two bump maps for regular materials, just like some MentalRay material. Its useful !

You allready have this too,, its a feature you have had since maya 1. Do this:

• Make two textures for procedurals with associated bump nodes.
• connect the second bump nodes out normal to the second nodes normal camera
• Repeat as many times as you wish, ive had models with 300 bumpmaps.

Or you can just add the bump channel values togetherwitha plus minus average node in case of saders that dont do he bump themselves.

• Brail tools often doesnt work you have to spend lot of time to fix.

Ok, sure but forget birail make a curve network tool isntead MUCH better, it does all wat birail does but any other shaoe aswell with less learning.

[joojaa]

it got deleted by mistake. I could try to ressurect it form my cache if you want. Done

[creativeuser]

-UV minimum distance: Ok may exist but would be nice to have it in maya.
-The Size Object Reference: the point is not make it, but maya and MR to use it!
-3D to bump: oops, ur right that already exist !
-Two bump maps for regular materials: ok but i'd like to do that with 1 click !

[joojaa]

-The Size Object Reference: the point is not make it, but maya and MR to use it!

Somebody has to make it, be it you, your mom or as in this case your suggesting autodesk. If you get autodesk to do it they will do it somehow in a unsatisfactory way from your point of view.

Thing is you only need to make it once and reuse it, if you have many friends who need the same feature only ONE fo you needs to make it. Its cheaper and better that way. I'd rather have autdoesk do something meaningfull taht i can in no way myself affect, such as making it possible for nodes to pass trough component data partially untouched. Thsi gives us more tools to do the small stuff, since we can never ever be able to do this.

PS: a renderer like MR has no real concept of scale because optical effects work the same at any scale.

-Two bump maps for regular materials: ok but i'd like to do that with 1 click !

Yeah sure, but then how would that work? I mean as its now i can make it 4 clicks but have no idea how to make it one click without always forcing 2 bumps of type i dont want. (four clicks as in, i want to make bump, winch bump, i want to make a bump, which bump. Besides what about all the people who need 3 bumps)

As it is now its 6 clicks so there's sure performance increase to do it faster. But yes its pretty easy to add a button to the ae template to add a second bump to the chain. No big deal. The problem is if you allways start to do this kind of fixing you end up with infinite amount of work. Next thing they want is same feature for color, specular etc. Mind you not thet it cant be done, its there already after all.

Now the thing thats hard to pinpoint is when is the functionality such that all users are happy with how it works and yet not distracted by the function. So if you have a GOOD explanation if how it would work out then thats a different issue.

And then at the end of the day why not ask for a make my work button?

-UV minimum distance: Ok may exist but would be nice to have it in maya.

that's the exact point of all of this, if your not willing to exert effort to use something that exists but is not shipped iwth program X then its stands to reason that you wouldn't use program X either because its not doing all of the work for you.

You have to understand that mileage varies quite much, and the ONLY way to be on top of the game is to make sure the functions you need are there. At the end of the day you clients dont care, and clearly because your using maya you dont care enough.

So the addition has to be something thats really useful fro both you and me on some metric of fair. Sure I understand that usability is a n issue to some extent. But you know mayas not exactly your average consumer application. All prosumer applications have more or less peorblems of this kind, simply because they are not stupefied to the death.