Maya’s World and All It’s Directions

Many ani­ma­tors new to 3D spend count­less hours search­ing for the magic but­ton in maya that will make there ani­ma­tions look good.

I found it .…… it is right here:

Seriously?.….all jok­ing aside. IT DOESN’T EXIST!  .…. Being an ani­ma­tor is being an artist! And, in being an artist you must explore — make deci­sions — and have fun!

Three sce­nar­ios usu­ally occur:

1.) The ani­ma­tor jumps in and starts tweek­ing curves before they have a strong foun­da­tion of keyframes.
2.) They Key frame too much and end up with “poppy” /  “clicky” ani­ma­tion that needs a lot of fix­ing and clean­ing up.
3.) They open the graph edi­tor after key­ing fram­ing and get scared, then close the graph edi­tor because they don’t want to mess any­thing up.

Here are few key strate­gies to com­bat these situations:

1.) Make sure you really under­stand the mechan­ics of the action that you are try­ing to cre­ate.  Act it out if pos­si­ble! Use ref­er­ence when you can.
2.) Make sure each pass is as solid as pos­si­ble real­iz­ing that noth­ing is set in stone.  Refine­ment is the name of the game.  As Frank thomas said, “At the end, the char­ac­ter should be doing quite well with­out you — thank you!“
3.) After the first pass, work with the graph edi­tor open!  See­ing the curves as you explore will help you to under­stand what is going on.

In order to help demys­tify Maya’s World I invite you to watch the fol­low­ing video:

Now that you have more under­stand­ing of Maya’s World and Direc­tions watch this video about Tim­ing & Mass:

On to another exam­ple that deals with curve pat­terns, Rota­tions vs. Trans­la­tion and Accelerations:

 

Pen­du­lums (Energy being used up & Overlap)

 

Whips (Favor­ing Break­downs, Break­ing Tan­gents, & Proper Curve Progression)

That’s it for this post.  I hope these help to demys­tify the graph edi­tor some­what. Just remem­ber that explor­ing these tools and try­ing dif­fer­ent things out is your best bet in becom­ing more comfortable.

Craig