Post 39 - Reaction Manager

Just a quick post this time to explain the key similarities and differences between Max's Reaction Manager and Maya's Driven Keys. Both systems are essentially used to do the same thing, which is to drive a transformation of certain objects; namely, to control one object using another. In both systems, you are required to load a master and a slave (driver and driven in Maya). In Max, you set a series of states, which house the translational information of the objects. In Maya, instead of states, it is keys, but apart from the name difference, they are the same. I found the Max system slightly confusing to start with as when you load you master and slave objects, it automatically creates an initial state. 


The problem with this is that if you want several things to be controlled at once, it creates 3 or more states. However, it is simply a matter of deleting these and creating a new state which will include all of the slaves. Also, in Max, all of the reactions which have been set up are displayed so if you are trying to locate a specific rotational value of a bone for example, it can be a tad confusing. But there is a work around by toggling the show selected button a few times, this will show only the master object which is being added to. 


In Maya, there is the almost opposite problem. Setting up a driven key is extremely simple and easy to do. However, once a driven key has been made, it can be difficult to find it ever again. This can lead to having to delete the object which has the driven key and starting over again. It can be found by selecting the controlled object and finding the link in the hierarchy view but a bunch of options need to be toggled before you can find it. Additionally, Max's advantage over Maya is that in Max, key framed objects can be used when recording states. This makes it very clear and quick to set states up. Maya on the other hand isn't as key frame friendly and can often lead to the key frame itself being a driven key. A major issue I had with this was when I deleted the key frames used to set up driven keys, the driven objects were still being driven, but by noting so not a good thing to happen. I resulted in not putting down key frames and did it by hand when setting driven information. 


Both systems can be used to great effect, but they do have their software specific problems. They are however extremely useful and tends to be the main method for wiring bones/joints to controls (essentially its saying; when object A moves up, object B reacts to it and the reaction is what ever to tell it to be such as rotate, scale, move, all a combination).