Not long ago I started playing with the demo of maya 2010. Now, it’s 2011’s turn. With 2010, I was mostly focused on seeing just how far I could push the 64-bit renderer. I also played around with nCloth and parts of the muscle system, but that was about it. With 2011, I’m trying to be more thorough.
One thing I was curious about was Assets. It’s one thing to read the description, but I had to see it in action to really get what the big deal is. At first glance, they seem to work just like group nodes, if you’re just adding objects to it. Publishing an attribute from one of those objects to the asset node seems like it could be done with a script in older versions. Where the asset node really shines, is in the Hypershade. I created several shaders and utilities, added them to the asset node, and POOF! Gone! Double-clicking the node opens it up so you can work with the nodes. Now I understand how this could benefit characters - rather than having the hypershade littered with dozens or hundreds of utility nodes, all those nodes can be tucked away inside an asset node, drastically clearing things up.
Animation layers are something I’m almost ashamed I haven’t tried sooner. They were a regular part of my workflow in Max, to the point that the may have become a crutch. Whenever I tried animating in Maya, I missed that feature. From what I’ve seen so far, Maya’s animation layers work very similar to Biped’s in the ways that matter, and add in a few very useful tricks.
The new skinning tools also deserved some attention. If I can finish cleaning up Bill’s model, I may have to use him to fully test out the interactive binding tool. One thing I was able to try out now, was the dual-quaternion skinning. Since it’s built right into the smooth-skin node, this meant that all I had to do was load one of my characters, and switch the method from linear to dual. Here’s a comparison of the two methods on Daisy -
While it’s far from being a perfect solution, the dual-q mode at least seems to help maintain volume. The verts will still need to be carefully weighted, the only difference now is you may be able to get away with weights that would look terrible in linear mode. Pose deformers will still be needed in key areas, and fortunately that plug-in works just fine with dual-q. I’m not sure why I thought that it wouldn’t…