OK -- I know there's at least loren and a couple others that have 3d experience... So I've always been interested in 3d modelling on the side (just playing around with Maya PLE). One thing I've wondered is if you are going to do facial animation, what approach do you take for modelling the mouth? Do you add a bunch of control points and actually pull the face in to make a smooth indention or do you cut a hole in the face and model addition objects to construct the inside of the mouth/lips? If I pull the mouth into the face (i.e. not cutting a hole), I often get weird creases where there's an extreme distance between two control points (the ones right on the outside of the mouth and the ones that were pulled into the mouth.

Oh -- and another thing ... There are several examples that talk about cutting a sphere in half and modeling half the face then mirroring back over so its symmetric across the middle of the face. One problem I've always run into with this is that when you mirror back over, there's always a slight seam at the mid point that I can't ever manage to make disappear completely. Part of my problem here is obviously not fully knowing the tools (don't worry, Amazon has gotten a recent investment in Maya books ). Just curious if most people use the split/mirror way or if it's better to just model the whole thing using a "pristine sphere".

ms

facial animation: we almost exclusively use bones in the face for animation these days for our game animation. Usually the mouth is just a sucked in umm... area... think of punching a big slab of dough and having it close in around your wrist. The surface is still in tact, so no cutting. Then the teeth and tongue are added geometry either constrained or parented to the jaw bone or root of the neck. The end of the chain, the effector, is weighted to the verts on the face, so they each have a range of influence. I'll have to see if i can dig up an old model to send you. What version of Maya are you running?

As for face modeling, most of the folks i've seen around here use the half sphere mirroring technique. I wish i knew more about it so i could give you some complete instructions. I've yet to see a good tutorial that shows what is actually used in production. I'll see what i can dig up...

Cool -- thanks for the info ...

In reply to:

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What version of Maya are you running?

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Maya 4.5 PLE (the free one)

And while I have you here Do you typically model with polygons, nurbs, or subdivision surfaces? I'm pretty drawn to subdivs myself at this point -- it seems to offer the ease of polygons with the power of nurbs ...

I personally haven't modelled anything in years... we have modelers for that. =] But, for games, we exclusively use polys. Subdivs are common for movies. You should see the model library we have access to from ILM... most of the models are so heavy they choke my dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz box with a gig of RAM.

I'll see if i can't get you a blank rigged model sometime today.

Yeah, pretty much what you say goes here, too. No-one models but the modelling department. Half of that is done in Maya, half in our proprietary stuff. Depends on how long the modellor has been at the company. That also determines whether sub-d or polys are used -- our proprietary modelling tools are polys only, and our proprietary animation and rendering tools can't handle nurbs (to the best of my knowledge), so those are ruled out automatically.

So far as I can tell, all our humanoids are modelled in half, then mirrored. I don't know for sure how they deal with the seam, but so long as the vertices on the seam are welded so that you end up with a single normal, you shouldn't be seeing a seam at all. Mouths appear to be the push-in thing, with extra geometry for teeth/tongue.

I'm not 100% sure how faces are rigged at R&H, but I don't think it's with bones -- I think it's all weighted control points. But then, it's all proprietary stuff, so I don't know how much of it translates to what's in Maya.

Yeah -- I think the merging the vertices on the seam is what I need to do ... Mirroring w/ polys is no big deal -- it's more a problem that I have when using subdivs .. When you're working on one half, the mirrored side is not actually attached to the right side (that is, it's two subdivision surfaces, not one). So maybe the seam would go away when I got all the way to the end and merged the the objects together and the center line would collapse into a single normal. I never actually got that far because I was so busy trying to get rid of the seam

pmed you MS

Wow, so Maya is really "the thing" for 3d modeling? I played with 3d back in 1998 or so, using trusty TrueSpace 1 and 2. I couldn't do character stuff, but I love doing anything else. I have a great feel for 3D space on the computer, but I just don't have the right tools to do much of anything.

I heard Maya 5 is like $5,000. True? Man, what I wouldn't give for the free time to play with 3d again...

The prices have come down a lot ... you can get the base edition for like $2.5k I think. The nice part, though, is they offer the Maya Personal Learning Edition for free, which is basically an almost 100% base edition (only missing some very esoteric things) that watermarks all your renders. www.aliaswavefront.com --- i think there's a link on the front page for it.

i agree about the freetime ... i love playing around with it, but it's very time consuming....

ms

Maya is more or less "the thing". Alias|Wavefront has always had a strong modelling package. And yeah, it's dirt cheap now -- it's become the ubiquitous program for nearly all animation schools. Their pricing structure has driven the prices down for most of the high-end software packages. Houdini is still holding out at about $20k USD for the full license, but like A|W, Sidefx has also started giving out a free personal learning package (which doesn't watermark your renders).

Most of my work up until 4 years ago was with sgi kit, so a lot of my presales demos involved Alias Wavefront Power Animator, which later became Maya. We used to have to build very differnt demos for different audiences - the games companies always wanted polygons, but the film companies were big NURBS fans. I guess with the power of render farms these days, folks are going more to sub divs, but NURBS ruled back in the day

Unfortunately I can't get a free licence version for my O2 I have at home, and I don't like it on M$ so my (very amateur) modelling doesn't happen often any more.

We use 3DS Max for our development, but I have used Alias PowerAnimator, Nichimen, and several proprietary packages of questionable quality.

That said, it appears the playing field between the two has flattened considerably. My experience with Maya proper is admittedly minor, but when it was first released the polygonal modeling tools were sad at best. From what I have seen and what I have been told, they have addressed this in the latest versions. It’s funny the lengths the two packages have copied each other (mostly for the best). It’s come to the point that I have to squint at screen shots to tell what program is on the screen. (Tip: Maya’s icons are a brighter blue. Good old “default shader blue”… 0,150,255 oh yeah…

We’ve had a fair number of applicants who use Maya. Some have stated they wouldn’t want to work somewhere where they had to use something else. The odd religious following both of these packages have saddens me. I can only assume it comes from a fear that their talent is somehow tied to a program and/or their differing origins. Maya of course coming from the SGI workstation dominated movie industry, and Max from the AutoCADie industrial visualization side of the tracks. While Maya used to be crazy expensive, they have relatively low-balled Discreet to be a great deal. Discreet claims to have an announcement later this month that will “revolutionize the 3D industry.” HA! I’m guessing they’re lowering the price now that they are not the lower of the two.

We did recently hire a Maya user who was a little nervous about having to learn Max. He claimed to be surprised at how similar it was to working in Maya. It was mainly the differences in terminology that was confusing. When asked if there were any tools in Maya he was missing in Max, he just shrugged. He claimed the only real difference was “Maya crashed for different reasons than Max did.”

I guess my point is, if you want to learn 3D modeling, focus on the techniques, not the package specifics. A good artist will be able create in either program. I understand how some don’t like to learn new ways to do things that they learned to be second nature in one package. If you focus on the methodology you can easily translate your skills to any platform. They’re really pretty much the same.

I can tell you two HUGE advantages that Maya has over Max... and if i'm wrong PLEASE correct me (it's been quite a while since i've used Max so i'm going on what i knew of it and what i'm still told about it. )

The biggest advantage Maya has is MEL. EVERYTHING is scriptable... even to the point of OS level. We click a button and it launches our Unreal engine editor or our game right out, while getting the newest versions from our source control DB. The tools we've developed with MEL are damn near incredible. Any modeling/texturing/animation tool that Maya lacks, our tools programers whip up in a day. I can ask for anything and by the end of the day i have it. Great stuff.

The second comes in the animation field. From what i'm told and from what i remember, Max is really weak on the animation side. ... Does it still not have IK? When i was choosing packages in college, that was the huge turnoff... animation with no IK?! HA! I went with Softimage (which is surprisingly lacking mention in this thread... XSI at least). In fact, ILM still uses softimage for animation.

I'm not trying to knock Max, it certainly has it's place. But all the people i've seen in the company move from Max to Maya have wondered how they got along without Maya for so long. So i'm not so sure it's package loyalty that's driving those folks who wouldn't wanna work in a company without Maya, some people just can't stand using Max =].

I for one wish Softimage hadn't dropped the ball with the insane delay with XSI.... XSI is damn amazing, and even more scriptable than Maya... you can use VB or Javascript in it for criminy sakes.

"The biggest advantage Maya has is MEL."

I hear this a lot... In Max its called Max Script. You can do almost anything in Max Script you can do in Max. There's also a cute, quasi-VB editor for making roll-outs and buttons and spinners too. I've only ever written scripts to ease some monotonous exporting tasks, but there is a metric ton of others I use to do all kinds of crazy things. Max Script has been around since version 2(?) but it was only version 3-4 were they finally attached all the systems to the scripting language.

"Does it still not have IK?"

Yes there's IK... this is another myth in the package wars. The first releases of Max did not have proper IK... at least you wouldn't want to use it... so I can understand why people would say it doesn’t exist. The IK has been improved in each release, as that has always been one of the bigger complaints. The Max 5 IK is pretty good... I am not a full time animator, but I have used it several times recently to animate some small critters. It's a lot easier to set up and use now. I've seen some crazy cool set ups with expression sliders and controllers. I'd like to have some time to brush up on that again.

Max also didn't originally ship with any proper skinning tools. You had to buy "Character Studio" with its “Physique” modifier if you wanted to do any proper vertex weighting. Max now ships with "Skin", a vertex weighting modifier. I didn't use the previous versions at all, but version 5's Skin is in many respects better than Physique. Full envelops, tendons, bulge control, morph angles, and paint-able weighting... (sound familiar?)

In Max’s defense, it has always had Character Studio available, which has Biped for quick (wait for it) bipedal animation. It takes a little getting used to, but the pre-built constraints and balancing makes animating humanoids really simple. I’ve not used the “footsteps” a whole lot, (I’m old-school) but the few times I have it has been invaluable for animating things like multiple characters over rough terrain quickly and realistically. I’ve always been curious if there is a Maya equivalent?

”I'm not trying to knock Max, it certainly has it's place.”

Heh… I’m interested in what you would define its place to be? I don’t mean this to be accusatory, but that sounds exactly like the sort of package-superiority dismissal that I find so tiresome in this industry.

It is sad though, what has happened to SoftImage. I’ve never used it for production. I’ve heard raves about its animation capabilities, but some of the modeling tools seemed very primitive. And the texturing process looked like an exercise in futility. I got very excited when they were purchased by Microsoft, hoping they would pour money into the company and make it the penultimate package… but we all know that went nowhere. What’s the word on the ETA for the next version?

I got very excited when they were purchased by Microsoft, hoping they would pour money into the company and make it the penultimate package… but we all know that went nowhere.

To horn in on your conversation I know next to nothing about, I'd always noted that Microsoft bought Softimage, removed support for all OSes except Windows, released one version, and sold it. I always thought that this was their game plan. Basically to remove Unix from the animation equation.

I don't doubt that would have been one of the end results, but I believe SI is currently available for Windows NT (et al.) and both Linux and Irix.

Still, as an all around 3D solution, it hasn't realized the potential it did have.

Bootsy: Awesome... thanks for the info. I think the reson those "myths" might still be around is that Max was lagging in those features behind Maya. All of them have been there since Maya 1 and gonig back to Power Animator. When i was a Sophomore in college, I used all of the packages (as mentioned before) and while Max was way easier to use for simple modeling purposes, the other packages were just way ahead, especially in what i was interested in: animation. Biped couldn't cut the mustard... it was awkward and not flexible. When we needed IK for the arms and elsewhere, we were screwed, as it didn't even have basic constraints at the time. So... i guess what i'm saying is that those who've been around all the packages for years have seen Max sort of trailing the pack... it could again just be my perception over time, but initially this was based on hands on experience.

When i say it has it's place, i in no way mean it in a degrading way... it's like the whole stupid mac/pc wars thing... whatever works for you, use it! It's "better" if it works better for the user, all the other discussions are worthless. I have quite a few friends in the industry who still work in Max, and as i said before, my opinions were just supported by those that i know who've switched to Maya and thought it worked better for them. But, i'll definitely shut my trap about my misconceptions. Max's "place" was always game companies in the past, since it was WAY cheaper and ran on PC hardware, when Alias and Soft only ran on unix boxes, which also added to it's rep as a lower end program i imagine.

Question about Max script (i'm genuinely interested in this knowledge, not trying to start a pissing contest by any means). How low level is it? I know one of the killer things about Maya is the Maya ASCII format of saving files, so an entire scene can be saved out to text format and hand edited if need be, which means that every command in the file could typed into the command line to completely recreate a scene. When they say everything can be scripted they meand everything. If Max has gained this feature that's a big plus.

Softimage: i loved that program for some reason. It had such a different approach to everthing. The interface was just insane. XSI has now gone more standardized on the interface, but i haven't even looked at it since 2.obeta, which was at least 2 years ago. I have no clue what's going on with it these days.

At any rate, thanks for the info, i'll definitely change my tune one that stuff!

I agree… I only jumped into this conversation because I’ve been around all the platforms as well and the one thing I’ve learned is they are all problematic. A lot of people ask me what package they should start with and I have to tell them it's not the package, it's the method that is important. The problem is the user of package X doesn’t want to admit to user of package Y they have any dirty laundry. It is some sort of innate human necessity to be on the “right side”, to the exclusion of everyone who might think differently.

I myself first started working in 3D with v1.0 of 3D Studio DOS. At the time I was astounded at the ability to create 3D artwork on commodity hardware. Now I look back on those days and cringe… It got me a job in the industry however. I’ve since worked on shipped titles in versions 2 through 4.blah and now Max versions 2 through 5.1. In the middle there I used Nichimen, a fantastic modeling package for the time. I’m pleased to report that both Max and Maya have successfully “borrowed” a lot of what made that package great. I’m also equally glad they avoided all the texturing and animating horrors it brought to the table.

I only used Nichimen for a very short time, sandwiched between using Power Animator (I’ve blocked the version #s out of my mind). From all the Hollywood FX hype I was expecting God in a Box. Man, was I disappointed. It had the best animation tools I had used at the time, but the polygon modeling tools were freakishly lame. There wasn’t even a simple “Skew” function!? Texturing simple polygons was mind-numbing work until we complained enough to one of our programmers. He wrote a very simple utility that made it a heck of a lot easier… even if the interface was a little unintuitive, I was very glad to overlook that minor problem.

These days I work solely in Max for the main reason we chose it for the cost and the available hardware (Maya had yet to be released and when it had, it was twice as expensive as Max +CS). In it’s infancy, it too suffered from many of the same problems the other packages had, but we were able to find plug-ins to ease the pain. Scripts came along later and it now seems someone with scripting skills addresses any little personal annoyance.

I know what you mean about Biped being awkward… It is a very different way of working that works well for what it does. The big problem most people had with it was Max lacked a robust bone system like Maya/SI and so tried using Biped to make up for it… Surprise! Biped does not do a good job with say… oh, quadrupeds! Sigh… it took Kinetics/Discreet awhile to pull their head out and start fixing that hole in their tools.

To answer your question about Max Script, I’m really not sure how “low level” it goes. I’m just a dumb artist . There is a thing called the listening window, that when activated it will display the max script for the actions you take in the program. If you want to make a button that duplicates those actions you just drag the commands to a tool bar. I only use this rarely, as making it more robust, requires a greater understanding of syntax than I’ve been willing to learn. I do know that someone wrote a script called “Back from Five” that would translate a scene, with all the attributes intact to a max script file. It was made to transfer Max scenes from version 5 and have them open in version 4. It was pretty cool to watch it in action, but I never found it very useful. I’m guessing that’s the sort of functionality you are describing? Is it an out of the box export option? If so very cool…

To horn in on your conversation I know next to nothing about, I'd always noted that Microsoft bought Softimage, removed support for all OSes except Windows, released one version, and sold it. I always thought that this was their game plan. Basically to remove Unix from the animation equation.

That's not quite correct. Prior to Soft being purchased by MS, the *only* OS that the big three animation software ran on was IRIX. MS bought Soft at a time when a) Soft was the market leader, and b) everyone was in the middle of developing their next-gen systems (Maya, Houdini, XSI). Development of their next gen software (XSI) slowed while Soft was ported to NT. With the amount of money invested in SGI kit at large studios, they obviously weren't interested in jumping to NT. Not to mention the infrastructure problems. Meanwhile, MS gambled that PC hardware would eventually win its place in the studios, and they re-built what they had of XSI on top of NT. Everyone ignored XSI. Maya and Houdini come out. XSI does not. Maya and Houdini develop. XSI still not out. Eventually it gets to market about 2.5 years behind schedule. The film industry doesn't wait that long. Somewhere in the mix, here, MS realizes they dropped the ball, and gets rid of Soft. Lack on existing NT infrastructure still keeps XSI from being integrated. Houdini and Maya get released on Linux. XSI eventually gets released on Linux, but it depends on emulation and crossover libraries, due to having been written for NT. Development of XSI again pauses for a rewrite to get rid of the NT dependancies, and, as of last year or so, is finally making inroads to where it could have been about 4 years ago. It's got quite a following in Europe, but it's still a bit player over here in North America.

I don't think MS had a game plan of removing Unix from the animation system, so much as it was a case of recognizing that ultimately the PC would outstrip the SGI big iron that was then necessary. The animation software was $20k a license, and the hardware another $20k. Had they gotten their act together, and developed XSI first, *then* removed Unix from the equation, they'd have been in much better stead. Another thing MS may not have been able to hack is the short development cycles -- they're used to releasing new versions of software every year or three. Side Effects has a development cycle where they release a major version roughly every year, minor versions every 6 months, and smaller incremental builds as necessary to fix bugs customers need fixed yesterday.

* these vague details are certainly coloured by my recollections, and may be incorrect. But that's the gist of things.