Re: Schematic View

[Eric Lampi <ericlampi(at)yahoo.com>]

I constantly use the schematic view.

People, especially younger CG artists sorta laugh at me for using it (damned kids), but I can't tell you how many time as I am sitting next to them that I watch them aimlessly hunt in their hierarchy for a node in the explorer.

I can pop open my schematic view and very quickly find what I need.  It helps that I actually name things, and put them into a null hierarchy that makes some ordered sense.  Don't get me wrong, explorer is great, but both have their place and strengths.

E

 

Freelance 3-D Animator, F/X Artist

----- Original Message ----
From: Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsilist(at)googlemail.com>
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 4:01:17 PM
Subject: Re: Schematic View

I fail to see why the schematic isn't a good window to estabilish connections.
Have two display modes per node like the rendertree does, with and without connection points (collapsed to active and not), and allow to click on a constraint link and drag it off a kine input and into another when nodes aren't collapsed (so to prevent accidents).
Parenting could be the same, but is nowhere as sorely needed.
How and where is that not ideal?
And yes, the explorer does cover a lot of ground that maya, due to the outliner being a piece of crap, has to cover in the hypergraph, but being ordered predominantly alphabetically and always vertically, it might require me to use two windows or a veeeeeery long drag waiting for scrolling to go down to estabalish a connection that in the schematic might be visually 2 pixels away (IE: one arm to another).

Regardless of the above, since you seem to like the schematic and use it, how can you think the current display and ordering routines are fine? Do you build by hand every little piece of every rig, knowing ahead exactly end to end what a 200pieces hierarchy will be like, and diligently place every node?
If you do, you're clearly insane or Japanese, but if you don't, and you ever tried generating a 20 segment tail + helpers procedurally, I'd like to know how you approach ordering 70 nodes of the same colour splattered horizontally all over other absolutely unrelated nodes, without losing at least half an hour that could be used for more important things. That is without even going into cases where you have a whole quadruped with a tail and a ghost generated procedurally, that kinda stuff basically precludes you from using the view entirely.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Thiago Costa <thiagocosta3d(at)gmail.com> wrote:

In fact I used/use hypergraph for about 2 years and yes it's way better then XSI schematic.
It boost productivity immensely in maya because the Outliner is a piece of crap. And because of that you fall into a very linear workflow, where just the hypergraph can make things more accessible. You can do less in the Outliner than you do in the XSI schematic view (parenting and selecting basically).
What we need now is a way of connect parameters on a nodal based interface, but I don't think this is something for the schematic as it's just a high-level-scene-overview type of thing...

Don't get me wrong, I think an update in the schematic would be great (specially for technical users). Be able to drag constraints would be great, API access, decent sorting algorithms... yes I want that!! Now consider that 90% don't need the schematic at all :(
This is why I said that these improvements are in the end of my list...