Re: Schematic View

["Bradley Gabe" <withanar(at)gmail.com>]

I spend more time in the schematic view than any other in XSI when rigging, also likely due to my roots in si3d. That said, I can't imagine being able to keep complex relationships in my mental RAM without the overview the schematic provides. And I'm likely one of the few who feels the XSI schematic view is an improvement over si3d, simply because in si3d, you *only* had the schematic view to see nodal relationships, whereas in XSI you have both the schematic and the explorer view.

The main difference between XSI and si3d (besides a far more advanced node selection heuristic in XSI) is that child nodes have an order in XSI, and order can be important. Refresh the schematic in si3d and child nodes sort based on spatial location. Refresh the schematic in XSI, and child nodes sort from left to right based on the order they were added as children. This also reflects their order in the children collection property of the parent. Of course, we had no built-in scripting interface in si3d, so order of children didn't matter and it was reflected in the workflow.

The wildcard in XSI's schematic behavior is node position locking. When the first schematic was released with XSI, there was no node locking, only the behavior of sorting children by the order they were added to the hierarchy. At the time, all the new users entering XSI were coming from si3d and had devised their own workflows using its schematic. One common workflow was to painstakingly drag all the animation controls in a rig into the shape of a person, with body controls in the center, and left and right limb controls extending out from the body. This way, an animator could use the schematic as a kind of synoptic selection palette. Si3d remembered the layout each time the scene was loaded. XSI's original schematic would always redraw the schematic on scene load based on child order, and that upset a number of animators who wanted to keep their schematic selection palette workflow from si3d. In order to facilitate this demand, Soft added the node position memory, which placated animators and annoyed riggers.

The irony is, most of the animators who wanted that schematic node position memory soon found new workflows they preferred anyway (such as animating in Maya). And those of us who continued to use the schematic for building rigs were stuck with a feature we found rather annoying. A few options and tools have been added since then to placate riggers, such as the reorder tool ('i' supra key), and reset all user positions. Personally, I use shift-r quite a bit which allows me to reorder only selected nodes.

The current XSI schematic can be tamed to behave almost the same as the si3d schematic with respect to node redrawing. You can store node positions if you want, and you can also sort based on spatial positions using the reorder tools. But there is new, additional functionality that didn't exist in si3d, like a far more intelligent node selection algorithm, and the ability to view and directly select many more kinds of inter-nodal relationships. I recall many painful hours in si3d of trying to select specific subsets of child nodes in the tangles of links and wires. If you accidentally clicked a child's link line, it would select that child node... or an entire set of children... oh, and there was NO UNDO FOR SELECTION!!! Come to think of it, based on that one feature alone, si3d's schematic kind of sucked ass compared to working in XSI's!

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 4:52 AM, Andi Farhall <andi.farhall(at)vtr.co.uk> wrote:

I used to live in the schematic in |3D, bit i don't bother in XSI because it hasn't been updated at all. Having a graphical diagram of relationships is fairly important in a system where you can plug this into that. Perhaps moondust will include something to make us happy on this score...

A.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM]On Behalf
Of Stefan Andersson
Sent: 27 February 2008 09:32
To: xsi
Subject: Schematic View


Hi All,

I might me 'old school' but I use the schematic all the time when I

rig in XSI. And "rearrange" still doesn't work as well as it did in

Softimage|3D... or does it? It just feels that it don't...

Anyone else that use it feel the same?

regards
stefan andersson


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Pixel Abuser (at) http://www.swiss.se/

Blog (at) http://sanders3d.blogspot.com/

Web (at) http://sanders3d.googlepages.com/

work e.mail: stefan [at] swiss.se

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