Transition from Softimage to Maya - some advices are welcome

[lonelycrowdgames]

Hi all,

As many of you know after Autodesk shut down Softimage many have been looking for an alternative and I personally choose Maya for quite some reasons...

My main focus will be developing characters for games, providing both modeling, UV, texturing, animations, body and facial rigs to be used inside Unity and Unreal Engine 4...
Luckly there are already some rigging tools which I'm using inside Maya to build rigs for my characters, so one problem is almost solved...

I want to ask you a couple of questions since I'm just learning Maya, but some advices will be great:

1. Character binding: I used to save my envelope weights on my character in an external file, but in Maya I see that you need a source character ( with the envelope weights ) and a target ( which will receive the weights )...there are other ways/tools to accomplish that or this is a standard procedure inside Maya?

2. In Softimage I usually store my animation inside what are called clips, which I can easily move on the timeline and, most important of all, expand or shrink, which of course will expand the keyframes of the animation or shrink them...is there a similar way to do that inside Maya?

3. Is there a way to hide selected polygons? I searched around and I found basically nothing regarding this

4. Which are the essential tools which you raccomend to use inside Maya? I see there are quite a bit of skinning tools and auto-rigger, MEL/Python scripts, but I would like to have a overview of what could be usefull related to game engines if possible

5. I was thinking to subscribe to digital tutors in order to teach myself basics and more advanced stuff and learn a proper workflow...other suggested site to learn Maya like a pro?

Thanks everyone  

[joojaa]

1. Sure you can map them via uvs also.

2. may has animation clips yes.

3. Sure, its a oneline script.

4. Maya is essentialy a custom tool build software eachs user will have a lot of custom tools that have no counterparts in other users. If you know how to use maya you know how to script maya. Since these are the same thing. A good maya user builds tools when he needs them and a studio user has a TD to craft them for him. So maya requires a new studio setup most likely.

In anycase NEVER and i mean NEVER try to use a application as it were a replacement for another application. This will never work. So to use maya you need to use maya and not some approximation of softimage, otherwise you will only become very very unsatisfied.

PS: It has been clear to me nearly 10 years that softwimage was going nowhere. So why not switch earlier? And offcourse your now switching to maya when the end of times for maya is in the horizon.

[lonelycrowdgames]

Thanks for the suggestions, I'm learning step by step using digitaltutors as a base how to use all the tools within Maya...

The answer to your question is simple: Softimage has all the tools I always wanted and the workflow is absolutely brilliant.

In the last years Softimage had so many improvements that made for me the perfect software to use, while I always find tedious Max ( which I used for 5 years before switching to Softimage )...right now, as far as I can tell, AD is aiming to create a ICE-like tool inside Maya, which probably will be released in the next 2-3 years...lets hope for the best...

I'm not aiming to be a TD and I know that build tools within your 3d app would be a great benefit, but honestly inside Softimage I always found what I was looking for without any needs for scripting

I never used Maya for a simple reason: doing my research and talking with people everyone always told me that scripting is required in order to build what you're looking for, and the animation workflow could be quite painfull...I was looking for a software with all the necessary tools I wanted and Softimage had everything I always wanted  

[_thecook_]

that's a rather weird assembling of words here...

PS: It has been clear to me nearly 10 years that softwimage was going nowhere. So why not switch earlier? And offcourse your now switching to maya when the end of times for maya is in the horizon.