[Maya 2018] Time editor and clips, are they worth it?
polycounter lvl 15
I've been experimenting a lot with the time editor and clips in Maya lately, and while I see the merit of using it, there are tons of little quirks and annoyances that make it very difficult for me to work with it.
Once you've converted an animation to a clip, it feels very "locked in". You can't really edit the animation as easily anymore or add constraints and such that you might want to use if a character is supposed to grab an object or something.
I've also been having trouble with layers. Using legacy animation layers, it's very easy to edit animation curves in the graph editor, because if you select a controller and the layer, you'll see only channels relating to that controller and that layer in the graph editor, making it easy to navigate. While using layers in the time editor, I can't find a way to "single out" a controller in the same way. I simply get all the channels for all the controllers in the layer visible in the graph editor at once, which is cluttered as all heck when your layer contains 10+ controllers with channels for rotation, translation, scale and custom attributes.
Another problem with it is that it's no longer clear what you're actually keyframing when you're hitting the S key. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't and you'll simply have to right click and click "insert key" to get it to actually keyframe what you want. It's cumbersome and slow compared to the old way.
There are things about it I really like though! The ability to overlay clips and blend between them is great for creating variation. The ability to split an animation up into segments and arrange it in a simple UI is way more intuitive than selecting stuff in the graph editor and moving it around, hoping that you didn't accidentally leave a keyframe unselected.
I want to use this feature, but I have to many questions about how to make it work properly. Any help is appreciated and any tips and tricks you guys have picked up would be amazing to hear about as well.
Once you've converted an animation to a clip, it feels very "locked in". You can't really edit the animation as easily anymore or add constraints and such that you might want to use if a character is supposed to grab an object or something.
I've also been having trouble with layers. Using legacy animation layers, it's very easy to edit animation curves in the graph editor, because if you select a controller and the layer, you'll see only channels relating to that controller and that layer in the graph editor, making it easy to navigate. While using layers in the time editor, I can't find a way to "single out" a controller in the same way. I simply get all the channels for all the controllers in the layer visible in the graph editor at once, which is cluttered as all heck when your layer contains 10+ controllers with channels for rotation, translation, scale and custom attributes.
Another problem with it is that it's no longer clear what you're actually keyframing when you're hitting the S key. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't and you'll simply have to right click and click "insert key" to get it to actually keyframe what you want. It's cumbersome and slow compared to the old way.
There are things about it I really like though! The ability to overlay clips and blend between them is great for creating variation. The ability to split an animation up into segments and arrange it in a simple UI is way more intuitive than selecting stuff in the graph editor and moving it around, hoping that you didn't accidentally leave a keyframe unselected.
I want to use this feature, but I have to many questions about how to make it work properly. Any help is appreciated and any tips and tricks you guys have picked up would be amazing to hear about as well.
Replies
I hope someday it will have modern NLE features and replace the classical animation layers workflow.