Maya Particles.. My thoughts. 2005-05-05 - By Andre DeAngelis
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Let's not forget that apart from forces, what makes Maya's particles
"work" is the sampling, which is way ahead of XSI.
Also, from a scripting/SDK standpoint, Maya's particles are considerably
more open.
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-- --Original Message-- --
From: owner-xsi@(protected) [mailto:owner-xsi@(protected)] On Behalf
Of Matt Hollingsworth
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 12:26 PM
To: XSI@(protected)
Subject: Re: Maya Particles.. My thoughts.
Hey,
I've been doing particles for the Fantastic Four film here at Stan
Winston, using XSI, and doing Maya particles at home, so doing both at
the same time. So, some thoughts on this as well:
There actually are a few things that XSI can do that Maya cannot;
delete individual points in the cloud, deform clusters of points, use
shape animation on clouds if they live forever. Maya can deform the
entire cloud, but not a section of the cloud. No shape anim. No inter
particle collision without trickery. But, yes, Maya's Fields (same as
Forces) are way way better. XSI's turbulence is directional and is
really wind. Maya's is actually just a noise function, but it works
really well. Expressions are indeed needed, but they are very easy to
use. For instance, on a turbulence field, youc an animate the movement
of the turbulence in the PhaseX, PhaseY channel. Like: PhaseX = 3.3 *
time; Simple. Also, it makes it easy to script individual particles
attributes suing other attributes. So, say you want the mass of an
individual particle to increase with it's age, jsut write "mass = age;"
Pretty straight forward. And, using ramps (grads) to define the opacity
and color of an individual particle based on it's age is pretty cool.
Most of this stuff you can do in XSI, but the fact is that there just
isn't quite as much power or control over forces in XSI, and that ends
up hurting a lot. In Maya you can apply a "Newton" field to a particle
cloud, and have it repel or attrach another cloud, ona per particle
basis if you wanna wait around for it to compute.
Anybody ever play around with Houdini?
Now, don't attack me. I am one of those fairly rare individuals who is
neutrel in this whole XSI versus Maya debate. I jsut like both for it's
own strengths.
Eric, share any other experiences you may have.
cheers,
-M
Eric Lampi wrote:
>So I've been working for a couple of days in Maya,
>trying to figure out it's particle system.
>
>In a nutshell, it sucks. There are some nice things
>about it. The playback is super fast, since it mostly
>operates in what we would call "live" mode. Their's
>actually works, where as in XSI, well, rarely works
>well if at all, and when it does it's not much faster
>anyway.
>
>They also have some issues with shaders, some things
>need to be rendered in Hardware.. or software.. It's
>not all that clear to me.
>
>The forces at first seem to work quite well right
>away. Often in XSI you apply a force, and it doesn't
>do much, or the results are not very good.
>
>I was amused to see that in order to add variance to
>any value, you need to add it as an expression, which
>is an incredible waste of time. In general you seem
>to have to have a decent scripting background even for
>the most basic functions. Overall it's been a
>frustrating experience, and Maya in general seems to
>be kind of messy. Navigating your emitters forces etc
>is much easier. For example, it's simply a matter of
>highlighting a force in the list to apply it to an
>emitter.
>
>It's nice that you can script functions and
>attributes, but I think it's pretty lame to make it
>necessary for really basic functions. Which seems to
>be the theme in Maya.
>
>So in general, XSI simply needs to improve workflow,
>speed, and forces. There are some additonal things I
>would address, but those are the biggest as far as I
>can see.
>
>I was pretty impressed with the ability to select an
>object, add a turbulence force, press play and watch
>it drift away. Which is probably the only thing I can
>manage to do in 3 clicks in Maya!
>
>E
>
>Freelance 3-D Animator, F/X Artist, Particle Man
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