Week 3 - Graph Editor and Dope Sheet

Work Flow

It is a brilliant idea to start developing a personal and efficient working method when it comes to animating, try to use as many different rigs and tools, so you can really tell the difference between certain meshes and different control systems. Personally i love creating controls and building rigs and as you can see above i have put an image of my finished and rigged Zoe model which was supplied to us in my rigging module. 

By rigging a character i have really understood the principles as to how the body works, and should work, it has helped me with anatomy and for that I'm extremely grateful for the knowledge i have gained. 

Seeming as i am going to have to create four animations for the group work, A run idle, breathing idle, extended breathing idle, kick door idle and crouch idle. I will be developing my own particular work flow which i find most beneficial for me. Everyone is different though, some people like to live in the dopesheet and the graph editor, where as i am much more of a visual person, i do everything by eye and feel as opposed to using spline curves and tangents. 

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't understand the principles of the graph editor and dope sheet though, so today i am going to be delving into this subject area, showing you how the graph editor actually works. 

Setting up Maya

Before we do anything, We first need to set up Maya for our animation, the best way to do this is through the time line settings and preferences. As this will be a cut scene/in-game cinematic, we will be rendering out in Real Time at 24 frames per second, as opposed to playing every single frame of an animation which wont look a great deal realistic.  The best way to do this is by clicking the small box on the bottom right, when a window opens, click on the Playback Speed drop down and select Real time (24 fps).

The next thing we want to change, are the tangent settings, in the same window, click the animation tab then click the Tangent drop downs (there should be two) and change them both to spline. This means the control movements will be working on a curved motion basis.                                      So now that everything has been set we are good to go!

The main reasons we change our tangents to spline, is so we can help ourselves work out timing, it also makes poses look stronger.

Tip: The most important tip i can give an animator, is to KEY ALL, by not keying all of your controls, you could cause unnecessary in-between's and it could really ruin an animation, things like the feet sliding or hands moving unintentionally will occur if you don't key all. 

Its so easy to do and saves a lot of cleaning up, and assures you have a nice neat dope sheet, Click channels > Key All in the channel box, and done!.

Dope Sheet

This is an incredible tool and is very useful when you need to change timings of an animation, usually you key everything initially in 10 frame intervals, then when the animation is finished, you can space out the keys and make the timing seem more lifelike and realistic, this is what you use to portray follow through and anticipation, by slowing in and slowing out.

To access the dope sheet couldn't be any easier, simple go to Window > Rendering Editors > Dope Sheet (this is also where the graph editor is located.

On the images to the left you can see that i have included various dope sheet images, all from different animations, the one at the top is an example of a bad dope sheet starting out, there would be a lot of in-between's and there's a lot of negative spacing.

The second image is an example of a very good dope sheet, as you can see everything is keyed and in consecutive linear order, this is the best way to work when you are trying to set up poses. Timing adjustments come later.

The final image is an example of a dance animation I made a while ago and you can see that is has some keys repositioned and gaps, but it works and in-between's are good.

Most animators like to offset their characters motions, for example, if you was walking in a straight line, your body wouldn't be rigid and stiff, it would be loose and your center of gravity would shift left and right distributing weight constantly and differently in each body part. This is also called twinning, its the intentional manipulation of a set of controllers where you make things look asymmetrical. It adds variety and flair to ones work.

Graph Editor

This is a brilliant tool, and most traditional animators are visual but modern day animators tend to use the graph editor a lot because it introduces a form of technicality and complexity to the arrangement of an animation. Its a beautiful piece of kit when it comes to editing key frames and tangent weights.

To open the graph editor you do it exactly the same way as you did with the dope sheet, Click Window > Rendering Editors > Graph Editor.

When the graph editor opens it will look like the image on the left. As you can see all of the tiny lack dots are the different key frames, and the lines connecting between them are the tangents.

As the time slider travels across a tangent, depending on how the tangent is set up, it will affect the animation sequence.

The first image is just a basic key frame on every controller but the controllers haven't been moved so the tangents are all very linear.  The second image shows my kick door animation which as you can see, the tangents are more curved.

As you can see in the image to the left, there are many controllers in the left hand panel, Ill go ahead and select the foot control and it will get rid of most tangents because i have selected a specific one. It will show curves for Translation, Rotation and Scale. The colours correspond to each axis. Yellow being Y, Blue being X and red being Z axis.

Next we are going to be talking about changing tangents. Before i delve into the controls, the first thing i want to show is how to select the actual tangent key.

As you can see in the image, i have selected the middle key for the Rotate Y curve as its the most extreme curve and will serve as the best example.

When you select the key you can see two handles either side, these tangent handles change the curvature of the spline.

As you can see in the left image, I have selected one handle and it is changing both sides of the curve as I rotate it, this is due to it being set to "unity Tangents" but this isn't what I want.

I want to change just one side of the curve, so a way to do this is to "Break Tangents". To do this we need to select the key, then select one of the handles and navigate your way to the top menu bar where you will see lots of different options which will affect the curvature of the spline.




On the left you can see that I have selected one side of the handle and hit break tangents which you can see is highlighted at the top of the image. By clicking this it will allow us to manipulate just one side of the tangent handle, affecting only one side of the curve.

Here you can see that I have broke the tangents (you can see break tangents selected at the top now instead of unify tangents).

This is very useful for offsetting your characters movement paths, and it is a very efficient way of fixing animation cycles and editing your poses.

Below are some more tools that will prove themselves useful. Step Tangents is incredibly useful because it allows you to see your major key poses without any in-between's, it jumps straight to the main key frames so you can make sure you have a strong stage.

When you are finished you can change back to spline curves then work on the in-between's.






Below are some basic ball animations that i have created using the graph editor, I wont be going into extensive detail and they are just for show because this is something I looked into in my first year of uni, if you would like to read more about it here is the link to my original blog. It talks all about squash and stretch, ghosting and much more.

URL: http://oliverstott.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/basics-of-animation-in-maya.html

So moving on, Here is the first ball animation I made, I apologise for the terrible quality. Blogger doesn't like my own videos sadly.

So in this video you can see that I have created a basic ball animation which shows ghosting,

This effect is very easy to achieve, simple Click Animate > Ghost Selected and it will show you the motion trails behind the main object and you can see exactly what is happening.
Its excellent for spotting in-between's and any faults the animation may have, it allows for easy use of tweaking.

In this next animation you can see that i have created yet another bouncing ball animation, but this implements all of the features of squash and stretch, it is a basic test that everyone should create, just so they get a better understanding of the principles of animation techniques. Squash and stretch is easily achievable through simply scaling an object and key framing the channel box attributes.