RE: Schematic View

["Luc-Eric Rousseau" <lucer(at)Softimage.COM>]

Well ,  I wrote this to explained the current Schematic view in response to comments that it fails at being a nodal editor à la Houdini.  It’s not what we were going for in that view, so it’s not a failure of the view that it doesn’t do this, or generic relationships à la Hypergraph.  That sort of workflow would probably go in new view, so keep the suggestions coming.   I’ve been thinking that another view may better reflects the dual-world of TDs and animator, for example.  For the Schematic itself, we are more cautious and conservative.

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of kim aldis
Posted At: February-29-08 6:03 PM
Posted To: xsi
Conversation: Schematic View
Subject: RE: Schematic View

 

I so don’t understand this reluctance to create a decent hierarchy and relationship viewer in what is, after all, a hierarchical data set. You desperately need a node view for viewing relationships and you desperately need to improve the usability of the schematic. Surely it’s not impossible to add that functionality without breaking it for those that use it as is.  I’d be willing to bet most of those would be ecstatic to be able to see and manipulate relationships in the schematic and those that don’t use it for the most part don’t use it because it needs badly to be improved.

 

Your argument makes no sense and if there’s anyone on this list you should be listening to  seriously about this it’s Brad. He has a better understanding of this and articulates it better than probably any other user you have.

 

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric Rousseau
Sent: 29 February 2008 20:06
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: RE: Schematic View

 

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.  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.

 

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.

 

 

From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of Bradley Gabe
Posted At: February-29-08 2:34 PM
Posted To: xsi
Conversation: Schematic View
Subject: Re: Schematic View

 

[…] 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.