Re: Schematic View

["Thiago Costa" <thiagocosta3d(at)gmail.com>]

no Japanese here... 
I was born in Brazil! Ha! And I don't like football(soccer) and samba... but I like girls. :)  Nothing else to say about nationalities... :P

Raff... yes I like nodal views... Agreed  that we need a graph with a better sorting method that understand all kind of relations and not just Parent/Child.
It doesn't mean that we need a hypergraph type of thing. Because I would hate to know that an XSI developer is spending his time to transform the schematic view into a "hypergraph".

So when you say "like the render tree does, without connection points", my question is: Where this thing need to stop showing stuff? 
A node can have gazillion of connections, talk about particles then... 
The XSI schematic is supposed to be a very high level graph of your scene. It means we see 3d objects and fundamental hierarchies, then constraints and expressions... Then operators like envelopes, shrinkwrap... and finally materials.

All of this is selectable/deletable in the schematic, the big limitation is that we can't establish connections (other than drag nodes holding Alt).
Isn't enough to have a toolbar with
constraints, parent/cut, create models, assign materials...? All that
kind of thing you use when over the schematic, so you can connect stuff
right on the nodes at least.

Now imagining we open a node in the schematic as we do in the rendertree, what connection points should we see when we open a node? (other than what is already connected).

A nodal based workflow is really helpful for
look/shader development and simulations, and this is why the
rendertree work so well.
For rigging is also interesting to have a nodal view, and I use it a lot when rigging. But I have it as a support tool for renaming and checking. It's not something that I just sit and say: "ah ok this arm, now with this chain, now I push this constraint, and lets envelop this mesh with that group..." 
It's more like: "let's see whats going on"... And I also do a lot of my selection in the Schematic when I'm rigging.

When I need to connect simple X and Y Kine in maya, the only way is to
jump to the hypergraph or the connection editor... Both suck ass
because as soon as I drag something I get a huge list of parameters
where 90% is useless most part of the time.
The explorer in XSI can become literally anything
with the touch of a button, from a renderpass management to a parameter
connection editor. And all this happen just over the viewport, where you can see the
effect of it and be totally that you are working with the
right objects.

Just to illustrate the discussion... I attached an image of a simple drag and drop in the maya hypergraph and trying to estabilish a connection in maya connection editor. 
How badly designed is this thing? How better it could be if it was in XSI? Imagine a node in the schematic view with all this crap hanging... now put it in a complex scene, with 100 nodes. How useful would be that?

Again I'm not saying that the schematic doesn't need a revamp... My point is what is necessary and what is just old fashion?

On 28/02/2008, Raffaele Fragapane <raffsxsilist(at)googlemail.com> wrote:

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...

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