Re: Coming back from Maya

["Ponthieux, Joey" <j.ponthieux(at)nasa.gov>]

Marco,
   I think you will be much happier with your decision to stay with the 
XSI Interaction model. I too used Soft 3D, then made a complete switch 
to Maya for about 7 years, then back to XSI. You'll likely find the 
transition back to the Z/O/P navigation keys very easy since you were 
accustomed to this prior to Maya. Some things I would mention:

1. Outliner equivalent is the Explorer. You can make it behave similar 
to Maya by activating View>General Sort>None, then activating 
View>Reorder Tool. This lets you place objects in the Explorer in any 
order you wish just like the Outliner. You'll likely find though in time 
you won't rely on this as much as you did in the Outliner.

2. IPR Equivalent is Render Region

3. You'll want to familiarize yourself with XSI's marking parameters. 
This concept is largely foreign to Maya or at least it was back in 6.5. 
XSI's Keying Panel is an attempt to be more Maya like, and it has some 
value, but in time I think you'll find yourself using the Keying Panel 
less and less.

4. Render Passes(XSI) and  Render Layers(Maya) are not the same thing. 
Maya has been updated in recent versions to attempt to mimic more 
closely XSI's Passes, it's still not the same thing. When you begin 
working with Passes, they are a new concept compared to Soft3D and they 
have incredible depth and power, unfortunately they are not always as 
easy to set up as  a simple render layer, especially if you are 
unfamiliar with how a Pass works.  Once you get the idea of what a pass 
is and how it works you'll see the immense difference between the two 
concepts. The new changes to the rendering setup also improves workflow 
for management of simple pass structures.

5. Related to Pass management, you'll want to brush up on Partitions. 
Yet another concept which will be new to you.

6. Models are unique subscene containers to hold geometry in. They 
behave like small mini-scenes within your scene. This a concept also 
foreign to Maya. Referencing might be a close approximate, but I would 
suggest that an XSI Model is very different. You'll want to focus on 
what Models really are early in your training process. The reason why 
this is critical is that a Maya Group and a XSI Group are two entirely 
different things. Groups might be remotely closer to Sets, but I'm not 
entirely convinced of that, though there are some similarities. Models 
play a significant role if setting up your Geometry hierarchies properly 
and in preparing things in XSI for export.  If you prepared a lot of 
exported components in Maya using Export, you'll want to know Model well.

7. XSI provides you a Maya-like command to simulate the activity of 
"grouping" things similar to Maya, this command is called Create 
Transform Groups.  XSI still uses Parent & Cut as well which you were 
familiar with  in Soft3D.

8. If you used Add Attribute on your objects in Maya in order to create 
custom Attributes, you'll want to investigate Custom Parameter Sets.

9. Inheritance in XSI is not only different than it is in Maya, it is 
critical to understand.  How a material gets passed from a parent to a 
child and how a hierarchy manages material inheritance and what 
materials have precedence and priority is very important. In general no 
object can exist without a material so if a local material is deleted it 
will then assume a global material or another material higher up the 
hierarchy. In XSI this process can get quite complex since materials can 
be applied locally, or through Passes, Models etc. This gets into the 
whole concept of Overrides and is something you'll want to investigate 
at some point.

This list could be much longer but these are the most immediate things 
which I recall in my transition from Maya to XSI.

Joey Ponthieux
NCI Information Systems Inc.
NASA Langley Research Center
____________________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and
do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.



Marco Vitolini Naldini wrote:
> Wow, what a welcome!
>
> Thank you all of you for your encouragement,
> for the detailed Maya-XSI list (great!), for
> the resources-list (some I knew already, some
> I didn't).
>
>
> I will stick to the XSI-Keyboardlayout and
> deactivate the "w"-key for some months ;-)
>
> Thanks again,
> best wishes,
> Marco
>
> (at)Sven: Yes, it was me with the Imagine Book.
> These were times.....
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