Shakiness in Maya Animation

Replies

• 
  Offline / Send Message

  okidoki greentooth

  Jul 31 2025

  Mainly blender use here too but always open to learn something..
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzAzkXqtIss
  
  ..interesting.
  
  

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
• 
  Offline / Send Message

  Eric Chadwick admin

  Jul 31 2025

  Maya Help | Camera Attribute Editor | Shake
  https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2026/ENU/?guid=GUID-C3EBB008-7DBE-4B9D-B9AC-1DA974CEFE15#:~:text=Shake Enabled / Shake
  
  But yeah for character animations, okidoki's solution might make sense.
  

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
• 
  Offline / Send Message

  5rettski triangle

  Aug 8 2025

  Thank you for the help, I actually ended up asking the guy himself and he said its hand animated

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
• 
  Offline / Send Message

  Nixellion polycounter lvl 11

  Sep 16 2025

   

  5rettski said:

   

  I am primarily a Blender user, but I have to learn Maya for my college course. In Blender, there is something called a "Noise Modifier" for the graph editor, which generates noise on the curves, to add randomness to your animation.
  
  I have seen games that use Maya be able to have shakiness in their pre-vis, hand-keyed, I just don't understand how it is done.
  
  
  
  https://x.com/i/status/1788917152868634744
  
  Is there something like this in Maya? Or do you have to manually do all of it?
  
  All help is appreciated!

  
  
  Hi!
  
  Tbh I'm not sure how okidoki's example can help add noise to animation curves, I mean with some technical knowledge you could hack together some kind of node network that would grab a position of a point from a noise texture and use it to drive a position of a controller on an animation curve, but I shudder to think the amount of work that would take to add this kind of noise to lots of different controllers, characters, scenes, etc. This is more about adding noise to geometry.
  
  So, there are a few ways of adding noise to animation in Maya.
  
  

  • Manual keyframing - this is the most straightforward way, where you can just animate it by hand. It requires no technical knowledge and is free! But it costs you time. For something short and one-off it's a good option, but if you need to add shaking to a lot of things, or for a long timeline - it can be very time consuming. You can use some tricks to reduce the amount of work - for example using an animation layer, creating some noise there for, say, 1 second of the animation, and then looping\cycling the animation of this layer (or copy pasting and manually tweaking it where needed). This way you can have a noise curve that is added on top of your existing animation, and you can control the strength with the Layer Weight slider.
  • Expressions - the classic approach in Maya for this is to use a noise expression. You should be able to google for "maya noise expression" or something like that. Here's official documentation of it: https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-A05EBF40-0149-4277-A210-89597C9DF774 but this approach is limited and technical as I don't believe you can add it to a layer (maybe you can, not sure). It's a good option, but in general a bit tedious to work with.
  • Plugins - you can use a noise plugin, for example something like my BroDynamics plugin (link in signature). It's a plugin for adding overlaps and physics to animations, and it also has a Noise simulation mode. It can generate perlin noise with flexible controls on any animation curve, and it can be generated to a new layer or to any currently selected animation layer. So it's kinda like the first approach with manual keyframing, except keyframing is done for you by a plugin, in 1 click, and you can try different settings and iterate quickly to find just the right amount of noise, amplitude, speed and octaves to get the result you are looking for.

  
  
  Noise in animations is a very powerful tool. You can do a lot with it, some animations can be created from scratch using just noise and some manual keyframes, some can be greatly improved with some noise. And sometimes even just adding a very subtle noise to an animation can make it look more natural and lifelike. Platigue Image used Noise extensively in Paths of Hate, and I can't find a link to it right now, but I remember it being covered in some "Making Of" materials. Like 80% of animation there is created using procedural noise.

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter