Lost in Sculptie Hell

If you are willing to provide the same funding the original film had I'm sure I can find some willing Blender users to do it.

Seriously though, this is about modeling a 32 x 32 face mesh, not about making a feature film.



How about compositing? You know, where you render out multiple layers then recombine them into the final shot? You have to use another application with Maya for that. Blender has it built in.



Actually I think you will find most free programs were made for the authors own use and they were kind enough to set it free so more people could benefit. Blender was the third generation of a design studio's in house tools.



Half the Blender to App X comparisions are done by people who were forced to use App X when they got a job in the industry.

And how many of the people looking for a tool to make sculpties are going to be sending their next CV to Dreamworks? For those type of jobs, it's generally a demo reel you'll be sending, and if you have an awesome demo reel, what software it was created in will be secondary. The studios are used to adapting to a new version of Maya or 3D Studio Max once a year anyway and know it won't take long for a skilled 3D artist to adapt to any software they need to learn.



So I'm only an artist if I'm doing it for a company?



How many feature films, TV Shows and computer games (I think you'll find 3D Studio Max is dominant there btw) were made with Maya 10 years ago? What makes you think there won't be a similar shift in tools over the next 10 years? Anyone watching the computer industry in general can see a big shift to open source taking place already. Do you really think Maya is and will stay so far ahead that it can't be displaced?

As far as the idea that by using Maya you learn a skill and by learning Blender you don't. That's just so far off I don't know where to begin. Maya is just a program too you know.



If gimpshop is so good, why didn't it become the defacto UI for The Gimp?



Well it'll get a lot easier for them when Blender 2.50 comes out. One of the features that is planned is definable keyboard shortcuts. Though why anyone would want to trade S for Scale, R for Rotate, G for Grab to something like W for grab, E for rotate and R for scale is beyond me.



Maybe because all they want to do is make sculpties and aren't interested in a job? Maybe because giving people information and letting them make their own mind up is a better approach than trying to enforce your views on them?

Great. That doesn't answer my question though. Did you watch the training videos and step through the tutorials or did you not?


If all you're talking about is simple manipulation of basic geometry by hand, then just about any program will do. What I'm talking about goes well beyond that.

You might as well be asking what makes Ferrari superior to a Pinto if all you want to do is drive 10 MPH to church on Sundays, or what makes a welding torch superior to a match if all you want to do is light a cigarette. When you reduce your view to include the nothing but a handful of the most basic possible tasks, there's not a whole lot of difference between any two tools of the same type.

The further you move past the basic convergence, the more apparent the differences become. I'd encourage you to widen your lens a bit.

Look, it's not that I'm trying to say Blender's bad (except for the interface). I do think it's a great program. It's just not as powerful as Maya is all. Those who think it is tend to sound just like the people who swear GIMP is as powerful as Photoshop, even though it's not. And then when you show them any of the many things PS can do that GIMP can't, they usually say "Well I don't need to do that". Well fine, don't do it then. But be truthful. Don't say it's "as powerful" if it's not, is all I'm saying. (Not saying you were doing that, just saying.)


I'll leave judgments about the price tag alone, as what makes ANY price worthwhile highly subjective, and means very different things to different people. What I will talk about are the things Maya can do with respect to sculpties that Blender cannot. Here are a few things that come to mind off the top of my head:

1. Blender's implementation of NURBS is fairly atrocious, so sculpting making sculpties from NURBS in Blender is pretty much out of the question. Without NURBS, modeling organic shapes obviously take significantly longer. In Maya, you can make sculpties from both NURBS and polys with equal ease.

2. Maya's ability to create and bake ultra high quality procedural textures for sculpties, especially when you throw a high-powered 3rd party renderer like Turtle into the mix, are quite incredible. To my knowledge, Blender simply cannot rival this. From what I've seen, Blender's rendering engine is OK, but not great. Even the Maya software renderer, which is by far the worst renderer available for Maya, seems to turn out much better looking results than Blender's renderer.

3. I'm sure someone will take up the task sooner or later on this, but unless I'm mistaken, there is currently no way to make an object out of multiple sculpties in Blender, spit out all the sculpt maps and baked textures in a single click, and then automatically create and assemble the full model in SL. Over the course of just a handful of projects (or even one large project), the amount of time spent doing all that by hand for every prim could more than make up for the cost of Maya.

Geez, I can't keep up, hehehe. I finish writing one long post, only to find another one just as long right above it. I'll try to keep my responses short on this one.


Well, I think we're talking about more than that at this point. In any case, I listed a few things above that are sculpty-specific.


Yes, Maya can do that. I recommend using a dedicated compositing program like After Effects, but if you want to composite in Maya you certainly can.

Maya also has a feature called Maya Live, which helps you combine 3D animations with live action sequences. It can match camera movements, lighting, etc. It's pretty cool. Does Blender have a similar feature? I haven't seen it if it does.


I'm confused. Have we now transitioned from "Blender can do everything Maya can do" to "Well, so maybe it can't but I don't need to do those things anyway"?


Not entirely true. While the quality of the work will obviously come first, studios absolutely do make hiring decisions based in no small way on an applicant's experience with particular software.


That sounds like wishful thinking at best. For the artist, upgrading to a new version of Maya has always meant nothing more than having new access to some more powerful tools. The new stuff always builds upon the old. If you were somehow stuck using Maya 5 for the past 5 years, and someone handed you 8.5 today, you'd have absolutely no trouble doing what you always did in 5, even though there have been half a dozen upgrades in between. Should you need to do any of the the things now that you couldn't do before, you'll have no trouble learning those things right away, because it all operates on that same underlying logic I've been talking about the whole time.

Were you coming from Blender and handed Maya, or vise versa, it could be weeks or months before you'd be up to full power with the transition.




Considering Maya didn't exist 10 years ago, none. Maya 1.0 came out 9 years ago, in 1988. Before that, the programs that were Maya's direct predecessors were heavily used in the film industry. Movies such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were made with Alias, one of the programs that later gave birth to Maya.


There very well could be. However, I'd wager that it's pretty unlikely studios would choose to abandon what's been working so well for them for so many years. Maya's a pretty safe bet.

In any case, in the here and now, no such shift exists. Maya and Max are the two big standards right now, so why not embrace them right now?


Whether or not a program happens to be open source or happens to be commercial has nothing to do with anything with respect to what we're talking about. It's just a footnote.

If you want a prediction, yes, I do believe Maya will stay that far ahead. It always has. I don't see why it wouldn't continue to be.


The fact is you learn certain skills with both. Some skills are universal; some are not. A much larger portion of the skills learned from Maya will be universally applicable than those learned in Blender.




I take it that's a stab at trying to rehash the keyboard shortcuts I listed earlier. See how hard shortcuts are to remember in the beginning? You didn't even get them all right, and you probably just read them a few minutes ago. (Q is select, W is translate)

Kidding aside, if you're actually using Maya, rather than just talking about it, the key groupings to make a lot of sense. QWERT the order the tools appear on screen, as is XCV, which I also mentioned.

In any case, the point is if something doesn't make sense to you in particular, that's fine. As long as you can change it so that it does, great.

Yeah, this thread kinda spiraled out of control didn't it?



No idea. Who said "Blender can do everything Maya can do"? I don't even remember that part. I'd have set them right if I saw it..

Interesting that Maya does do compositing. I missed that.



I don't doubt they do. But Thunderclap made it sound as if it was a steadfast rule, no Maya, no interview. I was just pointing out it's not as cut and dried as that.



It could be. It will be interesting to see how Jamay gets on in his 30 days.



For anyone looking to get into the film industry now, that can afford Maya, then yes I'd agree they should go that way. For those that can't afford Maya then Blender isn't a hopeless option.

The Blender Foundation seems to have found a winning formula of setting a short movie project that will depend on new features in Blender. They presell DVDs to fund the development of adding the features to Blender and making and releasing the movie.

The second of these movies (Elephants Dream was the first - now commonly used as a HD test) is in the early stages at the moment. Hair and fur is the main feature being developed for Blender as part of this project.

The knock-on effects of commercially successful projects like these and the improvements to Blender will make it more and more acceptable as an option for movie making.



Translate is move right? If so Blender's grab is the equivalent. I had to go back and read the Maya ones a few times to check what I was posting so yes I did see how hard Maya's are to learn.



Yeah I know. Not a great choice in my opinion. I much prefer reading something like

rzz45(enter)gy6(enter)sxx.6(enter)

And being able to follow at a glance what is going on..

r = rotate
z = constrain to global z
z = constrain to local z
45 = the number of degrees to rotate
(enter) = commit change
g = grab
y = constrain to global y
6 = number of units to move
(enter) = commit change
s = scale
x = constrain to global x
x = constrain to local x
.6 = scale factor
(enter) = commit change

using shift with x,y or z would have excluded that axis and constrained to a plane instead.. I'm sure I saw that on a Maya user's wish list

Then why, for the love of prims, have you been advising every newbie who asks how to make sculpties that they need to buy Maya? Is there some concern that these people are going to be creating multi million dollar blockbuster movies and they might not use the industry standard software to do it? We are talking about sculpted prims here, not rocket science!

Four options!

Maya
Max
Blender
and AC3D

Chosen Few - I totally agree with you that Blender sucks at nurbs. Its just something that few blener people use and not many are actively supporting. I'm more of a box/ sculpt modeler with polys. As for the MEL scripting language, its great if you don't mind being locked into the Maya toolset. I just wouldn't use it for anything else.



Think this is all re-keyable in Maya? If so, I might try the trial version and take more time with the video tutorials.

Domino Marama - You and I are totally at eye level here. Blender may not be #1, but it should be the best choice for those without that much expertise in 3d concepts. If by chance the 3d novice decides to take these newfound skills farther, nothing will stop them from spending whatever time and $ to learn those other de-facto apps. And where our bias is concerned, that last quote above relating to how I use keyboard shortcuts to manipulate objects reflects how I think also.

Not all of it applies directly to sculpties, but some of it does. The three items in the first list, for example.



Sounds like a plan. There are way more than three options though.



Yeah. I'll take some of the blame for that. Emotions probably ran a little higher than they should have all around, and we all let the topic stray. It could have been a lot worse though.


Sorry if I put words in anyone's mouth. I thought that was in there somewhere. I'm too lazy to go back and look for it now. My bad if it's not there.


Yes, it will. Jamay, I'm hoping you'll do well. If you need any help, feel free to hollar.


Probably not unsound advice. However, Maya Personal Learning Edition is free. It puts a watermark into all renderings, but other than that, it's fully functional. I don't know for a fact, but I would tend to doubt that the watermark would be offensive if present in a demo reel.


Very interesting.



Yeah, translate is move.


Well, I was half kidding about it being hard. Of course it is if it's just blurted out in paragraph form in a forum post, and not actually taught or practiced. I wouldn't expect anyone actually to memorize anything just from what I write here, even when I am in teaching mode, which I wasn't then.

What happens is as you use the program, you just kind of absorb the hotkey usage on auto-pilot. It's kind of the same way you learn to use alt-zoom camera controls. You do it a few times, and then it just becomes second nature. If the logic is solid, it takes over subconsciously, and then habits become instinct pretty quickly. It just takes doing it instead of reading it.


Different strokes for different folks, definitely. That system looks like it would be an absolute nightmare for me. No way would I ever want to have to memorize all that just to make some artwork. No wonder I've cursed so much every time I've used Blender. I'd rather work as visually as possible, always. I'm an artist, not a programmer.

Don't misunderstand me; it's not that I can't see the logic in it. I certainly can. It's just that I can't help but feel kind of claustrophobic and trapped if I have to put so much of my left brain into what I do. My right brain is what does 90% of my work. (That includes not just the visuals, but also the math required for modeling, strange as that may sound. In my mind, I tend to see and feel the math, rather than think it. The computations appear to me almost as forms of color or as shapes to be divided or combined, not as actual numbers to be calculated. It's hard to describe in words. Maybe a quote from Dr. Who would be appropriate. "It's all just sort of glibby globby timey wimey stuff."

I think the sort of code input you're describing from Blender appeals only to a certain personality trait, which I do not possess. In my opinion, that tends to be the downfall of many open source programs, including both Blender and GIMP. Because they're created by programmers, who invariably all have the aforementioned trait, they tend to be chock full of those sorts of features. The result is an interface that people without the trait tend to interpret as backwards or unfriendly. People with it will swear up and down that it's wonderful, and that it makes so much sense. But from everyone else's point of view, that seems almost crazy.

In any case, if you wanted to incorporate an input system like that into Maya, you could. You'd just need to write a MEL script to serve as an interpreter, and then you could type those exact same commands all day long. Again, MEL is the true power of Maya. With it, you can make the Maya platform do anything. (I even did my taxes in Maya via MEL a couple years ago. No joke.)

Once again, I couldn't keep up.


It's too bad if there indeed is too little support within the Blender community to improve the program's NURBS capabilities. NURBS are such a wonderful medium for use in film, an Blender seems to get used so much more often for film than for anything else, it's surprising that more Blender users wouldn't be demanding the program improve in this area. I guess many users probably just don't know what they're missing since they've never had better.


Right, it won't work outside of Maya. It does do a really good job of understanding other scripting languages though, so if you want to code in, say, Python for example, you could, and MEL will have no problem understanding you.




It absolutely is. As I said above, you could just write a MEL script to act as an interpreter between those Blender commands and the actual MEL commands that do the same things. I'd actually be surprised if no one's ever done it before.

I must say though, aside from habit, I really can't imagine why anyone would want to do that. There are so many other (easier) ways already present to whatever you want to do in Maya, force-fitting all those extra text commands into the system seems to me like a giant leap backwards. I guess I'll just have to bow to my own wisdom from a few minutes ago on this and concede that you probably have that personality trait which I don't, so you can enjoy punching all those keys while I find the whole idea to be slightly repulsive. Again, different strokes for different folks. Nothing wrong with that.

*reads through all the post and promptly forgets what her original question was*

I really appreciate everyone's input on this. I think keeping up with this was almost as difficult as the first tutorial that I read. Since I am in no rush to master sculpties, I am going to download the Maya practice program. It a kind of full version that teaches you how to use it. Its free and there doesn't seem to be a time limit on it. Hopefully it will limit the technical jargon so that those less familiar with all these techie terms can keep up and get better each day.

I know that alot of you pro's get really excited about this stuff, but reading this scared the hell out of me. I am not a graphics designer, but I am all in favor of bringing new content into the game. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) it means learning and mastering new things...those who love to teach are willing to help, but they usually have the untrained like myself staring at the screen with drool running down our chin as we try to keep up with the forum and garner some advice that we can actually understand. For alot of us its almost like we need a "sculptie for dummies" kind of thing. I want to learn it, I want to create with it, I need help, but I need the help in simple english to start with. It seems that Maya gives you the most for your money. No I don't want to drop 2k for a program...but wth my son wants to be an engineer...if i can't use all of the features, maybe one day he can.

So as I venture into learning Maya, are there any pointers, hints, hidden shortcuts, or hazards that I should be aware of?


P.S.

Please keep it simple for me I am not that versed on the technical jargon...oh question...has anyone used or seen the Adobe Photoshop extended that is supposed to also do 3d?

Hi Jaynessa,

From what I could glean of your posts, it seems to me that Wings3D would still be your best bet if you're looking to get the best and quickest results. Based on your own evaluation of your aptitude in this area, neither Blender nor Maya would make for a good starter program. Temper my suggestion with the fact that I am also new to this hobby, but I've given both Blender and Maya a try, and suffice to say I found my blood pressure falling back to a less fatal level only when I booted up Wings again.

It may be to your eventual benefit to learn one of the most powerful 3D platforms out there (ie. Maya), but there are a couple of problems with it. I do not believe you can make a sculpty with the trial version, because it slaps a watermark on the end product, rendering it useless when you try to import it into SL. Therefore, unless you're willing to buy the retail version---or find a sneaky way around that little dilemma---you may not get the satisfaction of seeing your scultpy in play.

As for Blender, unless you are a willing to spend time to learn the interface before you actually model something, you may want to set it aside for when you find that Wings just isn't powerful enough to do what you need. Not only is it somewhat buggy (at least on my computer, and I have a good, well-maintained rig), but the interface is also far from intuitive. I haven't gotten far enough to experience it myself, but I also believe the process of exporting the model to scultpy form also involves several steps, as opposed to the (basically) one-click solutions provided by Maya and Wings.

Looks like I've run out of time for now (stupid work!), but simpy put, Wings will allow you to shape something very quickly and very easily, and as long as you don't cut the object, add faces or vertices to it, you won't run into any problems importing it into SL. I invite you to take a look at the images I included in my own thread, "Sculpting faces in Wings3D," to see what I was able to do with it in a scant few minutes without having to read an encyclopedia. Give it a try, and good luck!

I agree totally with Kronval that Maya is not a good choice for you.