wesserbro wrote:
i'm not saying having good performance is bad! Im happy when i can playback my rig smooth . I hate when i need to wait 1 min per frame for houdini fem solver to calculate, and would love to have it realtime.
But! You, as the only one in this thread to mention real maya ability, didnt name something like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9X_kgc7-R8, or bunch of others cool thing coming in tons year after the year from siggraph. Instead you named ability to smoothly animate with sds on and 3 quaternion methods. And its not the rock into your yard! Its the situation where there is no real competition, as i already said.
All the time, I'm trying to talk only from personal experience, these methods obviously are not a part of that. Also, long time ago as an gamedev artist, every morning had to listen about new and new exciting Sigraph paper, from programmer who worked in same room, perhaps I become chronically allergic since then...
Really annoying part is constant, constant usage of plain, mocap style rigs (no tendons, no influence of underlying bones..), which by self can't describe anything realistic, all that with undefined skinning (perhaps some Maya default) to show disadvantages of linear skin. While probably every idiot knows how to insert a plain interpolator on elbow or knee.
Just practically, only widely accepted method by game engines is still, twenty years old linear skin. If I'm correct, even 'benign' DQ skin is removed from Unreal, while ago, never even implemented in Unity. Nobody wanted it, from what I've heard. Here, software like Maya has advantage because out-of-the-box deformers are *not* conceptually advanced, so they are able to transfer into engines or another software, while 'hearth of deformation' actually are transformations, also easy to bake out, and cheap.
Anyway, deformations at level exposed in these movies, let's call them 'enough nice and smooth', definitively could be done by less than 255 deformers with less than 4 influences per vertex (theoretical limit of Unity), for something like full body rig minus facial rig, minus toes. But , but, only by having a very precise, mainly by machine created weighting, so, not by stupid painting, not by any of supplied automatic skinning method in Maya. That's 'practical goal' for me for now, let's say to utilize Houdini to create weighting for use in Maya.
One day when they'll put these methods on the road, as complete systems for use by final user, I'll take a look.
Regarding FEM Cloth and other cloths in H, by playing a little with grain solver in sheet mode, got nicer results on relative huge resolutions, 80K points or so, but don't know (yet) how to get effects like anisotropy with these grains - once everything is performed on points, mesh topology has no influence, it's just an uniformly deformed 'sheet'.