#tweenmachine

[reoxur]

Faking Maya's TweenMachine in Blender

[doppelgangersarentreal]

My Workspace

I wanted to talk a bit about my workspace that I tend to have open when I animate, and a bit about my shortcuts. I will do a post a bit later on workflow for a typical scene.

Windows

I tend to keep my workspace clean, and having a secondary display is a must. On my secondary I keep my reference file in an orthogonal view on Viewport 2.0 so it can go frame by frame. I put all my other viewports into High Quality Viewport as it will playback much faster and so I don’t have to playblast as much. I keep my shotcam open at all times, as well as the graph editor, for really pesky fixes. Things like grabbing many controls, or using a bit of math in the value text box in the graph editor helps me see what I’m doing. I also blocked in stepped, so I can see the “curve” of the graph as the values change and I can see smooth transitions.

In addition I tend to have my leica/story reel open too to match composition and acting beats. When I installed Keyframe MP, they had a maya add on that allowed you to sync any video file to your timeline, so I was able to match timing more accurately.

Shelf

I actually have two shelves, one at the top for commonly used Maya Shelf commands, and a lower one which is essentially a color-coded picker.

My shelf at the top are some scripts I’ve have written myself, a rotate, translate and scale reset button, which I use constantly. I have a pick10 and pick30 script that allows me to determine the sensitivity of how close I am to picking a control/handle, having the number very large allows me to be far, and very tiny when I’m somewhat closer in the viewport.

Near the middle I have a “CURVES” button which is specifically written for Malcolm, which toggles the visibility of his minor controls. At the end are the tools I use the most and thats just a mirror picker, which allows me to pick the mirror control without having to search/add to my current selection. Just a quicker way to pick tools.

ATools Animation ToolBar

aTools select sets have changed my life. Its the tool I use the most and the best part is that it will save with your maya files. I tent to use the same controls for most scenes, and I create brow/mouth controls so I can slide around lip sync. Having an ALL button so that I can shift timing has been a huge time saver, and the color coding allows me to group controls for easier selection. The minor increment tool I use from time to time, as well as the Pivot control which is also handy. Atools is a little bit broken in 2016.5, but the tools I do use it for has sped up my workflow.

On top of this I’ve been using Andrew Silke’s hotkeys that he used at Weta Digital, and I’ve gotten used to some commands, such as isolate select, skeleton view, deselect, as well as the new marking menus which allows me to add/show cameras, controls, joints, locators fairly quickly. I’ve created a better next key for maya, thinking about releasing that to the public as I cannot live without it anymore.

TweenMachine

Finally, the only floating tool I have is TweenMachine, its the quickest way to block inbetween poses, its probably the first plugin I’ve ever installed. I don’t need to get into it too much as its such a basic tool, but look into it and install it. You click a button and it mathematically figures out the values for the “inbetween value”. I’ve modified the stylesheet to create bigger buttons.