Maya Wish List

[synapsevfx]

Say you want to explicitly input the influence of a particular joint on a particular CV. Right now, if you open the CE, it displays a long horizontal list of every bone attatched to the skin cluster in question, even if there are values for only two or three joints.

It would be nice to have the option to toggle only the joints you wish to see, and perhaps "prune" the display to only show joints that have an influence of "X" or greater (without removing all of the joints from the cluster, i.e. not pruning weights).

It would also be very nice if you could group the joints via branch roots or perhaps customize groups.

I've heard that A|W might have something in the works for this, but it never hurts to voice the request.

-SVFX

[twedzel]

Better like if you could load specified joints/ influence onjects into the component editor rather than always having to deal with the full list on a skinned object. So if you are working on weighting the smooth skinning an arm of a full body character mesh, you can select and load up just the arm/ shoulder joints. Save a bit of digging for stuff and speed up productivity/ and lower the chances of making mistakes by assigning things to the wrong joint.

Also Smooth bind once again, when you click on the very top of the row (ie the joint name) it does not include the 'hold' option, but just selects the weights. Meaning it is easier to quickly remove or add a uniform number to a whole group of verts/ CV's. In fact I think I will give this to AW right now in the form of a product feature request.

One other feature, Playing with Motion builder lately... nice animation features. One I would really dig is the ability to create layers of animation on a single joint, kind of like photoshop layers. So you get say the hip sway working nicely in a walk cycle but need to adjust anouther timing involving the same Rotational value, you do the animation on anouther layer... keeping your curves nice and clean and easy to edit.

Opps posted at the same time Syn... Same idea.

[twedzel]

Oh to the people who want to do a negative connection, its a really easy expression
open up your little expression editor,

RedBall.rotateX = -BlueBall.rotateX;

Hit create.

That's it! This will make the RedBall's rotate X the negative of the Blue. The power of Maya is in [censored] like these expressions. I love em because they are so much more powerful and versatile than messing around with set drivens and connections, (although of course I still use these in places, set driven key is a godsend). Just got to stick with naming conventions and make sure your giving things unique names, it makes it all so much easier.

[fanatic]

By posting your wishes here there are no chances that they will be passed to AW dev team.

Put them here:

http://www.maya.digication.com/

[joojaa]

yeah thats why this thread pretty much died!

[1000101-]

actually posting there is no better
however
at least this thread has a link to A|W's feature request site.
maybe if diication.com would post sometihng to assure me of A|W's response beyond the ussual courtesy email recieved.

[fanatic]

actually posting there is no better

This page - maya.digication- is offical.

It was announced by AW manager Shai Hinitz so it is made under request of AW.

You can also find some info in last AW newsletter.

[twedzel]

Actually I had heard of Maya's lack of attention to its user base, so I just assumed itwas true and never really bothered with posting feature requests etc. Until I started using Maya 4.5 and had an issue that really really bugged me. I went ahead and gave a product feature request on their website (which is under the contact us heading/ which is also what I was refering to in my earlier post) and very shortly there after had an email from their development team trying to understand further what it was I having problems with. After a few exchanges we sorted it out, and I must say that this definantly was not the lack luster customer relations I have been hearing about. So there I go not adhering to my own words of advice, and believing everything I read.

[1000101-]

Why doesn't A|W mention it on the website anywhere then?

[fanatic]

I don`t know.

You should ask Shai Hinitz.

He is the one behind this page.

[gmask]

I've wondered the same thing myself.. anyway.. on the next release we should go through what has been asked for and what has not been answered and recompile a new list. Obviously since Maya 5 is allready underway some of the issues may have been addressed.

I guess some reasons as to why there is a feature request page on AW and now this other 3rd party one os that they can compare the two. Most large developers will also doing marketing research and also poll their own beta testers for features. So it'lll be a combination of at least four different sources and then the developers own decisions making process about what new features are doable and how many fixes they can do. In this next version I think we will see a couple of new features but then everything else should be improvements on what we allready have.

I'd really like to see more integration of the wealth of ideas and user made improvements incorporated with the future distributions of Maya.

[king_numpty]

File Texture filter for vector drawings, eg AI-adobe illustrator. With scalling, color, stroke, layer visibility control.

[jtk77]

vector output on the renderer.

[rival2000]

Soft Selection in all tools (as Graph Editor, Uv Editor and of course on vertex )
Fur and all post effect integrated Mental Ray and faster Fur rendering.

[palodich]

"Say you want to explicitly input the influence of a particular..."

In the CE in the menu (View I think) there's a command that only displays bones/whatever that have a value.

[jugdish]

Perhaps this has already been mentioned, but has anyone noticed that the MEL Command Reference docs in 4.5 are a mess? The commands under each category aren't even in alphabetical order!

My wish is for a return to the old document layout.

• Matthew Durante

[casey-1]

For this animation request:

• Use peripheral devices like the mouse/joystick/midi as a motion capture device.

I wrote a MIDI mocap server for Windows, I announced it here:

http://www.highend3d.com/boards/showflat.p...p;Number=144464

And if anyone was actually interested in using it, I could make it better/easier or add joystick support.

I dunno if you want to add a pointer to that entry in the list or something.

Casey

[gmask]

The Maya Docs for the Mel Commands should be listed both alphabetically and by function like the 4.0 docs.

[novakog]

Here are a few things which have probably been said a lot, but I'm going to say them for the sake of stressing their importance.

Post Production FX (Glow, Maya's regular DOF, Light Fog) in Mental Ray. Even though they're not physically accurate, they can easily look as good with MUCH MUCH shorter render times.

Post Production blurred reflections - Mental Ray's blurred reflections look good, but they take up way too much render time and look noisy unless you seriously up the samples.

Folders in hypershade - complex scenes can have hundreds of shaders in them, a little organization might be nice

Multiple shader glows - c'mon A|W, do you really think we always only want to use a glow one specific way in a scene?

Although using HDR image-based lighting in Mental Ray is fairly easy, it's always nice to have a built-in UI for it. Which reminds me, can we have Hypershade and Maya properly display and preview HDR images?

Maybe a built in "fill volume" feature with fluid effects and particles - where you select a closed surface and the inside of that surface is filled with fluid or regular particles.

A special "tides/surfs" feature with Fluid oceans/ponds on beaches.

[joojaa]

In reply to:
Post Production FX (Glow, Maya's regular DOF, Light Fog) in Mental Ray. Even though they're not physically accurate, they can easily look as good with MUCH MUCH shorter render times.

Post Production blurred reflections - Mental Ray's blurred reflections look good, but they take up way too much render time and look noisy unless you seriously up the samples.

well yes this and much more is the reason for usage of compositiong apps like shake and likes... It allows you tto design such effects for any custom needs.

Well what did you expect the blurred reflections to be? in a raytracer.... huh.

bottom line is that maya is not a comp app. So use one.

In reply to:
Folders in hypershade - complex scenes can have hundreds of shaders in them, a little organization might be nice

it has folders alllready... altoug their use is a bit limitted... but all you need is to extend the mel a bit!