Maya Animation Workflow Tips and Tools Video
polycounter lvl 5
I've been an animator and/or a tech artist in the industry for over a decade now, and different versions of my core toolset are still in use at many AAA studios. My last AAA game was Bioshock Infinite, and at my indie studio I'm the sole animator/rigger/tech artist on The Flame in The Flood.
Over the years I've made a few behind-the-scenes videos and a few UE4 tips and tricks videos, but I thought it might be fun to finally showcase some animation and rigging pipeline tools. This is the first video in what I'm hoping will be a series about my Maya tools and how my scenes are structured. I tried to keep it short and to-the-point. I would like to go deeper into auto-rigging and my various animation tools in a future videos, but only if that is interesting and useful for other developers. Other topics could include how to set up a scene with multiple characters that have varying customization options for export, or more AAA pipeline stuff like that? Please check this out and let me know what you think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3q7cCsynKk
-Gwen
Over the years I've made a few behind-the-scenes videos and a few UE4 tips and tricks videos, but I thought it might be fun to finally showcase some animation and rigging pipeline tools. This is the first video in what I'm hoping will be a series about my Maya tools and how my scenes are structured. I tried to keep it short and to-the-point. I would like to go deeper into auto-rigging and my various animation tools in a future videos, but only if that is interesting and useful for other developers. Other topics could include how to set up a scene with multiple characters that have varying customization options for export, or more AAA pipeline stuff like that? Please check this out and let me know what you think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3q7cCsynKk
-Gwen
Replies
Looking forward to seeing more from you.
I generally have to create extra controls or constraints when I'm working with scenes that have multiple characters and/or props. For instance, Imagine I have Scout, her dog Aesop, and an animated raft that I'm animating in one scene. All of these are rigs that are referenced into one animation file. Imagine that Scout picks up her dog while she is on the raft and throws the dog onto a dock. In this instance I would create a global control for the dog that has Scout's right arm shader applied to it. I would name this control Aesop_ScoutSpace_Global and I would parent this control under Scout's right arm. I would also create a global control for the dog that has the dog in world space (so the dog can land on the ground) and I would constrain the dog's rig between these two global controls and key a switch between them. Now whenever I move scout's arm and key it, the Aesop_ScoutSpace_Global would also be keyed. That's kinda hard to follow, but does that make sense? I feel like any time I work on a scene with multiple characters and props I need to do some scene-specific rigging.
Another thing to note is that literally all of my tools look at shaders to determine what to do. So, for instance, I have a tool that saves animation poses and clips. If I were to save out Scout's pose in the above scene then Aesop_ScoutSpace_Global would also be saved. If I need to create or update a different file that happens to have the same constraint set up, then I can easily do that now. It's hard to explain all the use cases for this - this is one of those features that I didn't realize I needed until I had it, ya know?
Just had a look at your shader ctrls, it's a neat way to work. Remember seeing something like this before but I wonder why no one uses it. And I can't agree more on the whole animating with invisible controls, I have curves on a hotkey toggle.
Have you ever tried these on a more complex rig? How does it hold up with frame-rates etc?