On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <
lucer(at)softimage.com> wrote:
Actually the schematic in XSI isn't driven by XSI's architecture,
but rather by the workflow for a specific group of Softimage|3D users.
And who is this specific group of si3d users, and how are they these days? They don't call anymore. :-(
I don't think I said the schematic design is "driven" by the core architecture, rather the things we can do in the schematic are limited by what the core can do, and certain features requested by users would require core updates.
It's
not meant to show operators or construction history, and as you can see moving
nodes around is a secondary action (i.e. you can't just click and move
around nodes by default), and it remembers user positions of the nodes you
modified. We do not really want to show operator in that view or
complicate that view with more features that then "breaks" it for
these users, it's a conscious decision.
Right, and I appreciate that. I am one of your users that came originally from si3d, and works heavily in the schematic view. I would hate to see the schematic broken by making it too detailed. However, based on how I use it now (which is heavily influenced by how I used it in si3d) for keeping track of hierarchy, scene organization, and relationships at the x3dobject level (aka rigging), it wouldn't kill the schematic if we could make relational changes by clicking and dragging on the hierarchy, _expression_, and operator lines we already see in the interface.
XSI's Schematic was also a good way to view and edit shared
materials, but the size of the scenes and practices have evolved. The
Material Manager is the best place to view and edit these relations today, with
features and including "Who Users?" tab. SI|3D also didn't
have the powerful material inheritance feature that XSI has, simple things like
materials-on-groups.
[…]
As far as improvements go, it also seems there are two areas, aesthetic
improvements such as node size and layout, and functionality improvements such
as the ability to rewire operator connections. Aesthetic changes don't require
updates to XSI's core the way many functionality improvements do, which is why
we've seen a few changes in aesthetics of the schematic in the past few XSI
updates. We haven't seen any major udates to functionality such as the ability
to rewire operators, not because Soft doesn't want to, but because what we
already have in the schematic is likely a manifestation of XSI's current core
architecture.
