Moving From Blender to Maya: Learn a Layered Animation Workflow

1. Introduction: The layered workflow is something that I never saw done until a couple of years into my journey as an animator, but for a lot of people watching, it's going to be probably a breakthrough moment of my gosh, this works so much better than pose to pose. Hi, I'm Sir Wade Nystat, a 3D character animator and full time content creator, as well as a trainer and educator for animation. I've done a ton of tutorials for animators to get started using Maya, and I've done a lot of my professional work while using Maya as well. For a lot of people, it's one of those applications that you open it and you just use the few things that you know you need, and you never explore its possibilities. So I'm excited to show you some of the features that you may not have seen before and some of the workflows that can really help speed up your process. We're going to actually build up our shot using different parts of the body in different passes of work, working on the hips and then the feet and different things that will eventually come together into one cohesive shot. This will potentially allow you to work faster, more efficient and just to be able to wrap your head around what you're actually doing a little bit easier. So I'm hoping by the end of this class, you'll have a good understanding of how that process works, how to bring a shot to fruition using it, and you'll have the confidence to blend the two together. If you've ever done post deposed, you'll now have layered as another tool in your arsenal. To follow along with this class, you only need two things. You'll need Maya and a character to animate. You don't have to have any prior experience with Maya. If you do have 3D experience, whether it's in Maya or another through the application, it's definitely going to help. But if you're new to Maya, I'm going to show you the ropes of exactly what you need to know, where the certain buttons and features are and how to use them to accomplish the task in this class. I'm excited to dive in, show you animation in Maya. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Maya is usually considered the main tool for character animators, and it's been around in our industry forever. Some of the reasons that Maya has been in the industry for as long as it has and why it continues to have a hold on so many studios is partially because of how many people just know it, how many resources exist, tutorials, assets, characters, environments. Maya is just very entrenched in all the pipelines and all the technologies and everything that we have working in the industry, and it's expensive and difficult to get away from that, but at the same time, you don't always want to get away from it. It can be a very powerful application. DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, they have a lot of custom tools that live inside of Maya that artists will use within the Maya shell, but sometimes they're not even really using Maya features. Ultimately, it's all these years of existence that Maya has built this name for itself and all these things have been built on top of it that newer studios might not really need to jump into it because they don't have that history, that legacy, and they don't necessarily have artists that have been using it for 20 years. You'll see newer studios that are using other applications, but sometimes those animators that they'll hire still ask, hey, can we return to Maya? Can we use it for this project because there are just some things that I'm really comfortable with and I'd like to just do it where I know what to. Because there are, like I said, still some things that Maya has that other applications just haven't added yet. But all that aside, Maya is the first application that I ever got into a 3D. I know it really well, and while there's a lot of stuff in there, I'd like to focus in this class on the things that are the most helpful for anyone looking to get into animation and whether or not you're using this specific workflow, some of the things that you may or may not have come across that will help you work better, faster, more efficiently, and with less stress, which is ultimately the goal. A tip for anybody who is jumping into Maya for the first time, especially if you're coming from another application. Don't be afraid to customize it. Don't be afraid that you're going to break it. That was one of the things that when I was a student and I was learning Maya for the first time, I was constantly afraid that if I hit the wrong button or did the wrong thing, I wouldn't know how to undo it, I wouldn't know how to get back to where I was, but don't be afraid of it. Maya is just another piece of software. It's very powerful, but it's also very forgiving. If ever you completely ruin everything about it, the layouts are weird, the panels are missing, there's things that you can't find anymore, there are buttons we can use to just reset, start over, and that doesn't mean getting rid of your data, just resetting your experience in the software to make sure you have a solid footing. To start animating with Maya, you only need two things; the software, and a character. The software's pretty easy to get, and if you're a student, you get it for free. But if you're not a student, I'd recommend the Maya Indie license. Don't get the commercial Maya license. That's the really expensive one that just shows up on the website, and we're going to have a link to that down below. As for the characters, there's a whole bunch of characters out there. That's one of the benefits of using Maya is it's been around for forever, and almost all of the riggers in the industry who create characters, they do so for Maya. So there's a ton of free and paid characters that you can grab very easily, and a lot of them are really good. There are going to be some that you'll run into that don't give you the greatest experience, but it's all trial and error. Don't be afraid to just try different rigs. And once again, we're going to have some recommendations for you down below, as well. Now enough talk about Maya. Let's jump in and let's set up for animation. 3. Discovering Maya: Welcome to Maya. This is the interface when you first launch it. You might actually have the home screen, which would look like this. If you hit Escape, it'll pop you into the rest of the application. Just to point this out, this also has a lot of useful information. Under Getting Started, there's various tours and tutorials. If you've never used a 3D application, if Maya's actually your first and you have no Blender experience, for example, or Unreal, this will actually show you how to move through the application, how to move a 3D camera, things like that, which is cool. Most people don't know this is here. You'll notice that I'm using Maya 2023.3.1 specific version of 2023. It doesn't really matter, especially for animation. This is what you should see. I'm at the default layout, default settings. I've changed nothing yet. Let's do a quick tour. On the left is your Outliner. This little button will open and collapse it. On the right is your channel box, so anything you select will pop up its various attributes over here on the right. In the bottom right corner, we have our display layers which are empty. We'll also return to this. Animation layers live here as well, our timeline, of course. You can change the length of your timeline of how many frames you're focused on at one given moment, move this around. We have some settings in the bottom right that we're going to come back to. Those are important. We'll keep track of that. At the top, a whole bunch of menu items that can be a little overwhelming if you've never touched the software before. The only thing that's really important for us to take a look at is that there's an animation shelf. These are called shelves right here. We have the menu set, which is this dropdown. If we drop this down and switch to animation, you'll see that some of these top-level menus actually change. If ever you watch a tutorial or if I show you something in a menu that you don't seem to have, make sure that your menu set matches mine. Typically modeling is the default. We'll keep it with animation, but that's just a good handy tip to know. I prepared for you a downloadable handout which has some very handy tips and tricks on how to get started in Maya. Your 3D camera controls are all up here, as well as a whole bunch of hotkeys that I think are essential to know. There's a bunch of stuff for just normal viewport functions of animation, as well as some graph editor-specific functions since we'll be talking a lot about the graph editor in this class. Now some useful hotkeys just to start us right off is Alt B or alternative background is how I like to think of it. That will cycle the background colors of our viewport. I typically just stick with this light gray because the contrast, but there are some changes we want to make to our general Maya settings. Right off the bat, if you go to Windows, settings and preferences and then preferences, the other quick way that I usually get there in my videos is to go to the bottom right corner and hit this button right here, which I affectionately call the man running from the gear of death. That'll actually jump you straight to some animation relevant to settings in the time slider, but I'm just going to go top to bottom through some of the most essential things I'd like you to take a look at. In the interface menu, you can actually change the scaling of Maya. If your buttons are really small, this is one potential way to mess with that, depending on your monitor and screen size. This may not fully do the trick, but it's a good place to start. If you animate with a tablet, then you want to change this dropdown from automatic to WinTab. If you don't use any a drawing tablet, then this won't really matter to you. If we keep going down, a couple useful things. Underneath the little settings button is the world up position. Inside of Maya, why is the axis that points up into the air, whereas Unreal and Blender both have Z pointing up. This is not something you need to change even if you plan on animating a Maya and exporting that data back to Blender or to Unreal, those applications know that the stuff from Maya is going to come in with a rotation. You don't really need to worry about this. I just like to point out that it is here. If for some reason you need or want to change it, you can. You can also change the working unit, which if you're ever working with an effects artist, this might matter because Houdini, for example, uses meters. These are some of the things that working in Maya, you're typically working with departments at various studios. This kind of stuff is just important to know where it lives. In our case, as animation, we don't need to touch it. What we do need to mess with is under the animation section, we have a bunch of different settings. This first section called evaluation, you don't actually need to do anything with it, but I want to point out because it can become very important that you know about it. If you ever just have some weird inexplicable thing with your character rigs and they're just not behaving properly, you can try changing this dropdown to DG. That's the old evaluation mode from back when a lot of those rigs were created. Maya's a little bit slower. You lose some features, but it'll brute force the rigs to work in that old style. Essential button right here, turn on Auto Key. You can also activate that right here in the bottom right corner of Maya, make sure that's turned on. You definitely want this. That way when you make changes, once you have one existing keyframe and then you make future changes on other frames, it automatically saves that as a keyframe instead of having to lose your work after not remembering to hit the button. You can also change the behavior. Maya, by default, will only key the main thing that you change. If I, for example, come in here and I hit S. S is the key inside of Maya to set a full key on every channel that I can key. If I move over here to another frame and I move this up, you'll see in this top right corner in the channel box, the translate Y gets a bright red, everything else is pink. What that means is I've only keyed translate Y, and I move ahead again, move this down. I've just keyed translate Y again because I'm only changing that one channel. Then if I move forward, and then I just move this other channel, all the way over here, what you'd expect to happen is for it to go up then down, and then to the side, the way I animated it. What's going to happen is it's actually going to drift all the way the whole time. Why is it doing that? Because I didn't have keys to hold that translate X value in place from the start. This can be very helpful for a layered workflow, but if you're not expecting it, it can really throw you off. If that's a problem, you can change this behavior to key all attributes anytime you make any change, it'll key everything. I'm not going to change this setting. I just want you to know about it. I think it's better to leave it this way and set manual keys when you want so that you have the control over a full key or a partial key. I also recommend that under tangents, we change this from non-weighted to weighted. I'm also going to change these different auto spans to auto ease, which is the newer mode of the automatic easing of these tangents. Then if we scroll down, there are a couple other settings that we don't need to worry about. What we do want to worry about is a couple more things down here. Under cache playback, that's this button here on the bottom right corner, this feature is designed to actually put that animation data into your RAM, into memory, so that it can play it at the real-time speed. Just make a few quick changes to this. I'm going to change preferred mode from evaluation cache to viewport hardware cache that will actually allow us to use our GPU VRAM. If you have a graphics card, it will take advantage of it. If you don't, that's okay. Hybrid cache, we can say smooth mesh preview or we can say all. Yes, please with cache smooth meshes. Of everything that I just clicked, the most important one is this, background fill direction. It should work fine for forward and backwards. They've made a lot of improvements in recent years that this shouldn't be an issue. If you're doing advanced animation and you've got constraints and just more technical things in your shot, it is a safer thing to stick with forward from animation start. I'm going to jump ahead to undo because this is a pretty useful one. Maya used to have a finite limit of 50 undo steps. That is not enough. I think Blender also defaults to, like 32. All these applications have different numbers of how many undoes you're allowed to have by default. Maya is set to infinite now by default. I think that's too many because eventually, your file starts to get a little bit slow as your computer's keeping track of all of those undo steps, especially if you never close your scene. I'd recommend switching this to finite, but just make it a really large number 500, 1,000, something like that. I'm going to stick mine at 500. Finally, we're going to jump over to time slider. This is the default that it pops up to when you actually hit this button in the bottom right corner. It takes you straight to time slider. The frame rate of our shot is set here, which is the same as this menu, and I'm going to be animating in 24 frames per second, the typical film animation workflow. Changing this does not change it for every single Maya session. I'm going to change the key ticks from active to smart. I'm going to change the key tick size from one to two or three, just so you can see them down here in the timeline. You can also change your time display from frames to time code or a combination of the two, which if you're doing freelance projects or something, this can be really handy to actually be able to see your time code as well as your frames. Mostly just frames for now. This is probably one of the most important little combination of checkboxes. Check both of these on, turn them both off, turn them back on. For some reason, it's a bug. It's been here for a couple of years. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but if you turn them both on, off, then back on, this sync timeline display and sync selection in graph editor, then they for sure work. I'll show you what they do in a minute. Then we also want to turn on auto snap keys. Auto snap keys keeps us from having partial frame keys, for example, a key on frame 1.5, which you never want. That'll keep that from happening. Finally, under playback speed, play every frame is the default, which is for simulation workflows. We just want to see it at real time 24 fps. We'll cap that there, and we want to change the update view from active to all. That's all the settings we need to worry about for now. Save. Right now, before you do anything else, File, Save Preferences. Or you could always just close Maya at this point and reopen it. If you do all that stuff that we just did, and then you don't save preferences or you don't close Maya, but you just start working. If for some reason you do something that causes Maya to crash, all those preferences go back to default, and you have to do all this over again. Time to bring in our characters. We have two ways to do it inside a Maya. If you go up to File, we Create Reference, and we have Import. Import sounds like the thing that you're probably most familiar with, but do not import your characters. It will work, and it can be used for certain workflows. When it comes to animating at Maya, nobody does this. It is not recommended, so we're going to ignore it entirely. Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to create a reference. Ctrl+R is the hockey, but we just say Create Reference. From here, we're going to navigate to our character that we've downloaded. Now, by default, as soon as we open any menu, it always tries to open us to what Maya calls the project folder. That, by default, is in your documents/maya/projects/default. Then inside of that default folder, there's a whole bunch of these useful things. This is your folder structure that Maya creates for us, and we don't need to worry too much about it right now. I just want to point out that when you save your files, when you export a playblast, when you render something, when you go to import something, this is always where it goes to look. If we go to get our character in here, we go to File, Create Reference, and now I'll jump to my assets folder where I keep all my characters. One of the recommendations that I have is the Mecha Mechs. There are different versions, and I'm going to just open up dash. I'll hit "F" to focus my viewport on everything on the scene, and we have this character here. This is ready to go. Unlike other applications, like Unreal or Blender, when you reference a character in, it assumes you're going to animate it, and that's it. The first thing you always want to do is grab everything and set one key on Frame 1. Now when I go forward to some other keyframe and I change something, auto key is activated, and it's going to start interpolating. The benefit to referencing a character over importing, which I had you do without explaining it, if I were to have imported the character, it would have taken that rig file and embedded it within this Maya file. All the data from that character would be in here, and it would be very difficult to troubleshoot if something ever happened to that data, which from time to time can happen. You can maybe break your rig or something, and your animation data and your rig file live there together. It's hard to extract the data from the one and put it on the other. For animation, we do the reference because what that allows us to do is if I go to the reference editor, you can see that I have this character here. What's really cool about this is, let's say we have this character, and then from wherever we got it, let's say they make a change. They make a fix. They edit it in some way and make it better, whether it's a color change, they added controls, or they fixed a bug. What you can do is you can just right click on this asset and you can go to the reference section and you can say replace reference. It allows you to swap this file for the next version. If you do have a studio pipeline or if you have two assets that are very similarly made with that in mind, I can actually swap dash for his counterpart, flourish, which is the male, female versions of the characters, and it just works. If you ever want a second copy of the character, I can just hit this little button right here to duplicate the reference, and it'll make a second copy of the character. Just like that, I now have two versions of this character. That is the process of setting up our Maya for animation, bringing in our character. Once you've done all this once, you don't have to do it again. In all the future attempts, I can just open Maya, reference a character, and get moving. Now we're ready to go. 4. Animating Using a Layered Workflow: Let's talk workflow. The layered animation workflow is something that I didn't have a lot of exposure to when I was in school. It's more common now to know about it, but it's still not very well explained in a lot of places. Pose to pose is really common. You have your key poses and your anticipations and your breakdowns and that stuff, things that I've covered in previous classes. But when it comes to a layered workflow, first, I want to point out what is not. When I say layered workflow, first thing people usually think is, animation layers, I've heard of those. A layered workflow and animation layers were very similar, are different. If I have something in my, I'll just take this cube. I'll set a key with the button S, come over here, hit S again, and then move it over there. Now I have some animation. Horay. If I go over to the animation menu area over here on the right, there's nothing in this window. There is always something there. It's just invisible because we're not using the system. But all this animation that I put on this cube, that's just what we call the base animation layer. it's not really visible by default. But if I take this cube and I say, You know what, I want to layer on more animation. I say, Create Empty Layer. What we now have is a base animation, which was always there. We just couldn't see it before, and that's where my animation data lives. We now also have AnimLayer1, which if I try to click my cube and select AnimLayer1 and hit S to set a key, it let me set a key, but it's misleading. Even though I have this selected, base animation is the thing that's green, I'm going to undo that key frame. Now if I lock base animation, so I can't actually do anything, see how that little green circle went away. Now if I try to set a key, I get a little error in the bottom right corner. It'll say down here, warning active objects have no keyable attributes or animation layers are present, and base animation is locked or something like that. What it's basically saying is, I can't set any keys. You've locked the layer, but I might be like, Well, I want to add layers of animation on top of it. In order to do that, I have to add the object to the layer so I can right click it and say, Add selected objects to that layer, and now I can key on top of it. Now if I say, set a key here and I'll put this up into the air, zoom out a little bit, and then later on, I'll drop it back down. Now it does all that. But the thing is, I have this layer of animation which I can turn off. But if I click the Mute button, I can actually turn off that up and down motion. This side to side is what was there in the base animation, which I can't mute. It's always there. But you can see that up and down is gone. If I unmute AnimLayer1, suddenly, it does it again. It's combining the original animation with the animation layer on top of it. That is what an animation layer system looks like and a little bit about how it works, but it is not at all relevant to a layered workflow. But the idea is similar. If I go ahead and just clear this out, we get rid of that, and I'll go ahead and reference my character, control R, go to assets, and I'll pull in one of these little max once again. First thing is always grab all my keys, grab all my controls, hit S, set an initial keyframe, close my outliner, I don't really need it. From here, I can start messing with stuff. If you wanted to have a character jump, for example, in pose to pose, I might block out the character standing here in anticipation, the action of them jumping, another pose of them about to land, and then the down position of them landing. But in a layered workflow, we would approach it differently. What we would probably do is if I go ahead and just give myself a little bit of a set to work with here, I'll create a surface and a place to jump to. Quick tip, by the way in Maya, if you have a bunch of environment assets that you don't want to be selecting constantly, if you're trying to grab your controls and it keeps grabbing the floor, you don't want that. If I grab those environment assets, and in the bottom corner, we have display layers. We're going to go to layers and create layer from selected objects. That will create a new display layer with all the environment assets I have selected, and you'll just see it's Layer1. If I turn off the V for visibility, it turns them off. The P is for playback visibility. If that's turned off and I start scrubbing in the timeline, they disappear. I'm going to leave that on. But then the last one is this empty box. If I go to T, that stands for template, which I can just see a ghost to where it is or R for reference, meaning it's there for my looking, but I can't actually select these objects anymore. Every time you make a scene and you build out some environment, just throw them in a layer, make them a reference object, and now you can't actually interact with them. That's also how a lot of characters have it so that you can't grab their geometry. You can only grab the controls. Typically, you start with the biggest part of the action first. The hips on this character are the main thing that move them around. If I were doing a quick little blockout of a jump, you pretty much just put the character in this pose here. I'll take the arms, and I'll bend them a little bit. If I take the body, and I leave it there, I'll hold them in place for a few frames. I'll drop them down. Lean them forward. I'm hitting S to key the whole set of controls over here on the right. You can see that if I weren't doing that and if I were just doing the modifications, it's only setting keys on what I change once again. What I'm going to do here is just start blocking out. I'm using the idea of pose to pose, I'm blocking out my major poses. But I'm going to go ahead and just put the character up like this and then down. Bam. Maybe like that and like that. If I hit play, what I've done is I've left the feet behind. It doesn't look great yet. The main thing with a layered workflow is we want to get the graph editor open as soon as possible. It would help a lot to be able to see what the motion is doing because a layered workflow is a motion based workflow. We can start to figure out, what is the jump going to look like? Have the character squat down. But maybe I want to have the character not just stand and squat, maybe I want to have the character do a little bit of an anticipation here. I'm going to right click on this curve. I'm going to say insert key that adds a key right there. I'm going to have the character maybe anticipate up a little bit. I'm using the middle mouse button with my mouse anywhere in the window to indirectly manipulate where that is. If I want to isolate that to just up and down, I can hold Shift. I can have the character stand here, do a little bit of an anticipation, then drop down. I'm going to have the character maybe not drop down quite so quickly. I'll mess with this. This is where I'm starting to use some of the tangent weights and stuff that again, I'll cover this in more detail later on. But I just want to show you the process of drop this down and then here, maybe I have the character start down here. Stay low for a little bit longer. I'll favor this down pose. I'll delete this key. Then I'll have the character up into the air. I'll have that be my midpoint. It's a nice hang time with this, and then I'll drop that down. Down, overshoot, like this to auto tangents, make them go back to normal, and I'll ease into this final pose. Like that. then I'll add some extra key frames just so we have some room to see it end. All I've done is focus on just the up and down of the body. You can start to see the jump coming together at this point. This is the benefit of a layered workflow where you focus on just passes of information. I look at just the up and down. Maybe I start looking at the forward and the back. Maybe I have the character anticipate not just, you know, up into the air, maybe I have the anticipate a little bit backwards. Go backwards a little bit, maybe not quite that much. Backwards, down this way, I'll keep him back this way. I'll push him forward right here like that. I'm not worried about the knees breaking. I'm not worried about the feet looking weird. Get rid of this key. Then I'll just have move forward a little bit more in general. Down, forward, overshoot it a little bit, and then settle back. Just with a couple quick key frames, I'm starting to now build in some overshoot of the body. Maybe the body overshoots and has to settle backwards a little bit on the balls of the feet. He almost falls forward, but he collects himself and pulls back. The layers are not literal layers. The layers are just you looking at stuff step by step and building things over time with every ability to go back later and adjust. Making sure that you start with the most important parts first, like the hips, which most of the motion comes from. After that, I can start worrying about what the feet are doing, what the hands are doing, and things like that. But that's the idea of a layered workflow. When done properly, you can see that it's very fast. But as you get into that workflow, there is one trick that I'd like to show you before we move any further, and that is how to copy and paste properly. To show you copying pasting, I'm just going to take a sphere and a cube. I'm going to keep it really simple. If I hide my grid and just show you these objects, little Windows, animation editors, graph editor. I'm just going to drag this over to this side here until this turns blue, then I'll snap it into place. If I really like that, I can lock my workspace as well so that I can't undock that by accident. I can collapse it, by the way, by hitting that little tab very handy. Now, if I just grab both of these objects, I hit S to set a key. I'm going to take my sphere. I'm going to animate it going up. I'm going to animate it coming down, and I want to go back to the original position. There are a couple of ways I can do that. I can right click and say copy in the timeline. I can then right click and say paste, and that works fine. There's no wrong way to do that. That's a really easy way to do it. That will take all translates to rotates and scales and just pop it over by default. Another thing I can do. This is a nice little trick is if I am scrubbing around and it's down here at the end, I can go back to a frame that I like and say, You know what? I really like that first frame. I like its position. I can middle mouse click and drag. I'll click and drag with my middle mouse button from Frame 1 in the timeline. Middle mouse click on Frame 1 while I'm here, drag it over this way, now I hit S. I've basically just stolen that pose. I brought it over as temporary data, and then I keyed it and I pinned it into place. Typically, I think the most common way that people copy paste data in Maya is the visual way where you can actually see what you're doing. This is the most dangerous way to do it. If I take my sphere, I go to translate Y and I take this curve. I can take individual keyframes. I can take the whole curve by just selecting a curve with no keyframes. I can say, for example, grab that frame, control C, move over here, where my playhead is, control V. As long as I have a curve selected, it'll put it there. If I say grab the curve again, control V. If I don't have the curve selected and I control paste, it'll still put it, but the difference is if I have a whole bunch of curves available to me at the moment, whichever one I have selected is the one it'll paste to. But if I have nothing selected, it'll paste to all of them, which you usually don't want. You just want to make sure that whenever you're pasting, you grab what you're copying, you copy it. You go to where you want to put it, and you make sure that whatever you're trying to put it to, that thing is selected, and then you paste. Do not ever select something in your graph editor, copy it, and then put your mouse in the viewport. You can totally come over here and click stuff. Just make sure you return back to the graph editor with your mouse and click your things. Don't hit control V with your mouse somewhere over the viewport, especially if you have a whole character rig in the scene. My recommendation is for practice, do some animation. Set a couple of keyframes, copy paste them. Don't be afraid of this. Just give it a shot. When you're ready, I'll meet you the next lesson where we actually start animating our shot. 5. Approaching Complex Mechanics: Now it's time to dive into some complex mechanics. I'm going to opened a file that already has a run cycle in here. You are probably looking at this going, "Oh I don't have that in my file just yet." You don't have to have the run cycle necessarily to do what I'm about to do. I'll show you the setup for this file, and then I'll show you how you can modify it since you won't have the exact same file. My file is, we have a run cycle, then this gap, and then the run cycle again. Now, in our case, if you are starting from just a T pose character with whatever rig you're using, you can see I've also changed characters. Whatever you're using for your character is probably going to work just as well as what I've got here. But if you are going to try and follow along, then what I would recommend is instead of having a whole run cycle, just for this first pose, just have the character in a squat ready position, because that's more or less what these poses here, but you'll probably have two feet on the ground. On the landing, instead of going into a run position, you'll have your character land and stand there. You'll change the first and last pose, but you don't have to start off by doing that. Just do the first pose. Don't worry about the last stuff till the end. In my case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to implement a complex dive role. We have this run. Let's have the character dive over a box. I'm going to go ahead and make a cube, bring that in just like that, and my character is going to come, run and dive over that object. Right off the bat, I'm going to make sure I take these ground elements and put them in a display layers create from selected, set them to reference so I can't grab them, and we're set to go. I have the character already moving. There's already a run cycle, and so I'm going to put all this animation and layer it in considering what's already there. I'm going to have my character. I'll grab the hips. He's here, he's down, he comes up, somewhere around here, I'm going to have him step down onto that other foot for kicks, I'll do a couple of different things at once. I'll say the hip is down the foot is also down. I don't have to never touch the foot. I'm only touching the hips right now. It's my shot. I can do what I want to do. I can say, I'm going to scrub through. How is this looking? He comes in here, he takes another step. I do want to make sure that whatever I had with this back-foot, I don't want that backfoot sliding around. He lost all of his weight. He's just slipping. I want to have happen is frame 50 is where that foot, the front foot plants. I'll use that trick from before. With this back foot selected, I'll right click and say copy. Go to frame 50, right click, paste. Because it's a little stretched out, I have various controls to do a foot roll. Your rig is going to have a completely different setup. Every rig is different. Usually, it's some foot control. There's something over here in the channel box called foot roll, and you can just move that slider. In this case with this particular rig, it's a little ball underneath the ball of the foot. Sometimes it's this little spinny orb inside as well, and you can see that it's adjusting where the toes and the feet are. Usually what you don't want to do is just rotate the foot and move it. There's usually something to help you not have to do that. It's impossible to know what rig everybody is using, and all the rigs you'll use throughout your career are different, but usually you're looking for some foot roll control. What I'll do is say, well, you know what? That's a little bit more stretch than I wanted. Let me tone this down. Let me pull them back, and that's going to actually inform where this front foot is going to go. Maybe I just decide, you know what? I was going to go further, maybe not quite that far. I'll go there. That might be more reasonable. Go ahead and grab that little foot roll control again, fix that. Now I have the character come in here. He takes a step. Still looks a little bit weird. It's fine. We're not looking for perfection. We're just looking for the rough idea. Then after he steps down, somewhere around here, he's up in the air. He's sideways jump. For example, if I were just keeping up upright, he could just jump and then land back in this running position. But if I'm going for something more complex, I want to have him do a div role. I want him to dive forward over the box. In fact, I'm going to move this keyframe [inaudible] to shift click it and drag it. I'm going to go like this. So he goes, Wing. A little fast, but whatever there and then down, smack his head into the floor. I'll select it, copy it. More here, right click "Paste", and just to get the same pose. Then I'll say, well, I want him to do a roll. I'll align him as best I can to make this part easy. He was here, n ow he's over here, and he does a roll. Maybe I'll put him like this and he'll be sitting on his butt. I'm just layering in the base of the action. The only thing that's really happening is right here at the end. He's like, really spinning. If you are doing a character flipping, think about a clock for a second. You've got the 12 hand on top, which represents midnight, but it also represents noon. 12 noon and 12 midnight are the same pose on the clock, but they represent two different times. When you rotate 360 degrees on a clock, you're technically at a different value 12 noon, 12 midnight, but the pose is the same. Rotation values in 3D are the exact same way. I take my character from 12 noon, I spin him around to 12 midnight. However, the original pose that I had right here was still at noon. It wasn't rotated, what ends up happening is he spins 360 degrees and then he unspins 360 degrees. If I go to the graph editor, you'll see what I mean. If I take his rotation values and we take a look just at those three things, you can see that one of the axes, the green one in particular, goes down to a value of negative 353, basically 360 degrees, the full spin. If I go like this, you can see that it's actually calculating a sideways math, but then we also have this one. It's a weird combination of X, Y, and Z that's causing it. You would think, I thought it was forward and back. When you're doing a complex action, like a flip, you have your character do a full rotation. All you need to do when you have a flip is you select the rotation channels, you go to curves euler filter, and Immediately, you can see it changed it. What it did was it normalized 12 noon and 12 midnight and it made them connect to each other, so that it doesn't spin 360 degrees and then unspin. It does the math and then stays there. If I now just fix the rotation values, you can see that it's actually now using the red one, translate X, which is the one that we thought it should use, one that goes back and forth. He's no longer spinning this way. Now he does his little spin but it behaves as expected. That is a really, really handy little thing that you're going to want to know for more advanced animations. Grab all your controls, come back in here, set your graph editor to this button right here, step tangents. Now, I can go through with the period and comma buttons. I can step through those individual poses rather than hitting play 0 if I hit play, Oh, if I hit Play, it doesn't look like anything happened because I think I missed. I only have the rotation channels activated. Let me try that again. Select everything and make sure that I actually grab everything. There we go. Now by hit play, it only plays the poses that we've isolated, that we've actually keyed. Now, a few other things as we're beginning to block this out. We're still in the blocking phase, and one of the key differences of a layered workflow is, I never set anything to step. We absolutely can set it to step and layer stuff in with our hips and our arms and so on in stepped poses, so no interpolation, just teleporting from pose to pose from what we set. But a very common way to work in layered is just to leave it interpolating and we're using the motion to figure out the motion. One of the things I'd recommend checking out is a downloadable link I have on this video, the shot planning workflow and on it is a nice little list of things to look out for. One of those things is contact poses, wherever you have a contact and release frame. Here we have the feet coming into contact and then we have the feet leaving at some point, presumably we skip that whole section. Here he hits both of his feet down on the ground. We'll go ahead and just key the whole body on frame 49. I'll delete frame 50. We have frame 49 right there. And then here he's up in the air. I'm going to kind of do a hybrid thing here and I'm going to just bring his feet to be a little bit more useful like that. I'll key his feet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to layer in a mixed thing here where I want to have the character getting ready to jump or beginning his jump with foot up in the air like that, and the other foot still here on the ground. I'll keep the whole character just to make sure I have keys on things, and I'll tilt this foot up. I'll go like that. Now if I look at it, he steps, he jumps, he leaps. Now, once again, the interpolation is back. The reason that will keep happening to you is because in the animation preferences that we set at the very beginning, under the animation menu, it says the default tangents are Auto ease. Every time I adjust my I set keys and things like that, it creates new keys. It creates default tangent handles that have easing turned on. If you want to change that because that is just more comfortable for you, you won't find it in the default in tangent. It's not here, you'll find it in default out tangent. It'll go out as stepped. Using the stepped workflow, boom, and then the jump, right there. It's still using the ideas opposed to pose, but I'm not worried about the entire body's pose. I'm just working on the hips and the feet. Now if i play, it's starting to come together. My recommendation is every time you want to pose the arms, try to do it channel by channel. If I go to the top right corner of Maya and I can hit this little three-tiered icon with the hammer next to it, it pulls up the tool settings. Inside of Maya when I hit QWER my transformation hot keys, which are also little tools over here on the left, if I'm in rotation mode, you can see my settings for rotation mode, I'm by default set to object mode. If I switch this down to Gimbbal ktrua mode, most animators, especially newer animators to Maya, don't like working in this mode because I can't just spin the orb. It won't let me do it. But this is the most accurate just 3 rotations. When I move these, what you see is exactly what you get between this rotation orb and the graph editor. If I change this green one, the green one moves. If I change this red one, the red one moves. I change the blue one, you get the idea. Ultimately, I'm just going to start adding stuff. I'm going to clean this up a little bit. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to actually start refining some of the actions as we go. 6. Animating a Flip: Meet the ball. This character is a stand-in for the character we've been working with so far. Now, when it comes to these complex animations, there's a lot of controls. There's a lot of body parts. There's a lot of just stuff happening at once. As you saw from the last lesson, it can be a lot to look at and just to see all this stuff moving around can be very distracting. Sometimes it can be easier to just do what I call geometry blocking, where you take a piece of geometry and you have it do the action instead. Here, I've actually animated just the up and the down and the rotation of a sphere. This gives the rough idea of what's supposed to be happening. Now, on the top, I don't know if I pointed this out before, this is my actual camera view. If I go like this, select my camera, right there, you can see that I actually have my camera following the character. From the perspective of the camera that matters, it stays in the same screen space. From the bottom, we can see the normal world. I've animated the sphere just doing its thing. This becomes a really helpful base to figure out the timing and the energy of the shot that you're trying to animate. I would recommend doing this for a lot of complex actions. You'll see this in the behind the scenes of lots of movies, short films, even games because animating one object moving around at a certain speed is much less overwhelming than having the whole character with all the different controls, where you're tempted and distracted to start posing everything. If I look at the animation on the ball itself, this is what I've got. I've got my translate Y, the up and down, the jump, the fall, the roll. If I go to the rotate X, that is the roll. You can see it has this lean forward as it pushes forward. It goes into this rotation, you can see this would edit it. It stagnates a little bit, flattens out because it has hang time. It's not really rotating while it just does this little bit of a dive, and then it dips forward. We get to this, it doesn't move at all for this frame, and then suddenly it does the whole thing. We go from a value of 173 to 370. It does a whole spin. The numbers are not important. The point is the information is here, the data is there. I can use that if I want. There was a reason I showed you all that copy-pasting stuff because if you really like what you've got here, you can use it as a base. I can take this translate Y, select it, and I can paste it onto the root of the character. I can use the rotation values and use that as a starting point. You probably will still need to change it, but it can give you a good idea of what your curves might look like if you're using the graph editor. If nothing else and you ignore the graph editor entirely, it gives you something to shoot for when you're posing in the viewport. At the very least, it's just a helpful tool. I'll go ahead and just hide it now. Now, with my character, I've gone ahead and I've cleaned up a few of these poses. I still have stuff, like, for example, this back leg is just kind of stuck in space. You can only have a couple of keys on it. I have a key here, there. Then that one, I don't know why it's keyed, but it's just in the wrong spot. I should probably fix that. Then here, it's at this pose, and then eventually, nothing happens. At the moment, I've used this sphere to show what I might do. I actually went and deleted everything after the dive roll just to show that this can be a good starting point. I'm going to go ahead and keep adding poses. A little bit of time has passed, and I have added even some more stuff. It's not done yet, and you can see he kind of freaks out right here at the end. But we have the run. He does the little hop. It follows the sphere almost exactly, and then eventually does the dive. We have that pose from before, and I've added a little bit more to have him extend his arms and spin. He ends up on his butt like we had earlier, and then eventually he kind of freaks out right there. He just totally breaks. That's just the gimbal rotation again because I have undid what I did earlier. If I go ahead and just grab all these controls, go to the graph editor, go to rotation channels, what I can do is just grab all these curves, Euler filter, and you can see it fix that frame right off the bat. The main idea here is using that geometry-blocking workflow or that technique as a way to build out what one of our layers might do, what our hips should look like. The goal of that is to animate the energy of the shot. Now, after adding some more work and fixing the Euler filter, this is what I've got. It's starting to feel pretty good. All I've done to get to this point is by using the hips and if I look at the curve, I don't have a ton of key frames. I mean, there are several, but it's not like every single pose. If I step through it, you can see that I did spend quite a bit of time figuring out the beginning. His feet kind of just float off the ground, so not everything is perfect yet, but I have the overall idea of the roll. I haven't put a lot of time into the weight, but I wanted to make sure that when he came down on his hands and he supports his weight, his arms bend quite a bit. Go ahead and zoom in here so you can see it better. I wanted him to land on his upper shoulders with his hips elevated. Then his hips are on the ground. He gets a foot down under him. I'm looking for those contact poses. Then he puts the other foot down underneath him as well, and I move his hands down. Now, the hands right now are really rough. There's still an FK, which means they just rotate. They don't actually lock onto anything. I should switch them to IK if I want to have him actually plant his hands, which is why right now, they just kind of wiggle around. They don't actually stay on the floor the way his feet do. His feet lock onto the floor because they're set to IK. But for the moment, that's okay. I'm doing it in passes. At the moment, I've used that sphere workflow just to get the energy of the shots, the timing, the spacing, the overall feeling of this dive, hang time roll. If I'm watching it and it's just hard to tell, one of the other tips you can use in this situation is if your rig allows, you can also turn off things like the arms, the head, the legs. If they're really distracting you, you might be able to just turn them off. Some rigs have that feature. Some rigs don't. As we're working on this and I want to keep adding stuff, I'm just going to say, pick a target. What do you want to look at? What do you want to stare at? Because everything needs a little bit of work, so we can really look anywhere. If I want to grab the hips and focus on that, is there anything with the hips that I want to do? I could maybe adjust the down position. I could add a little bit more compression here. As he starts to lean forward, his feet come off the ground a little bit earlier. Maybe I can take his feet and grab both of those. This pose, they're both on the floor. Here, they're up in the air. I'm just going to say, you know what? I don't want his feet to come up just yet. I'm going to just Shift+Click this and I'm going to move this key over. It stays there for another frame, and then they come off the ground. It's a little bit better. We have a hyperextension on this foot, which means I should do something about that. I'll maybe grab the little foot rotator inside there and just do that till his knee stays a little bit bent. Then maybe this back foot, I'll do it a little bit less, just tweaking, just adjusting. But now what I've got is he stays like that. Now his legs actually straighten out all the way before he pops into the air. I'll go ahead on this next frame. I'll key it on 58, make sure I don't change anything. On 59, I'll point it down a little bit and move it up so we have a little bit of bend. I don't want hyperextension. Hyperextension is when the leg is pulled so far away that we have no control over the knee. You don't want that. You want to make sure that at the very least, you're back in range enough that the knee will engage right there. It doesn't have to be bent; it just can't be disconnected. So that's bad, that's fine. I can keep it looking very straight without having it hyperextended. That is a quick little change to the feet that now helps that jump feel a little bit better, where he actually pushes up against the ground. The back foot isn't really helping with that. The back foot is totally flat. So I'm going to go ahead and key that on frame 0 here on this frame. I'll rotate it, there we go, on this frame, like that. I don't know why this toe is all bent. Maybe I'll back this up a little bit, like that, like that, and there. Since that foot was not as helpful in the frame before, this foot towards camera is very straight. This one in the back is not quite as helpful. I'm going to say that that one in the back is still a little bit closer to the ground because it released a little bit later. It's like that. That's the process here, is just to pick a target, pick an object, and start adjusting it, tweaking it, and just improving it over time. Now Maya gives us some tools to help with this process. But before we dive into those in the next lesson, what I'd like you to practice, go ahead and add a sphere or a cube. I think a cube is usually better if you need a rotation values. I did the sphere and then made an oval so you could still see the rotation. That's fine, too. But take a piece of geometry, just a regular primitive and animate that object, doing whatever the action is that you're trying to animate. It'll still have all the difficulty of figuring out the timing in the spacing, but once you have that done, you can use it to help inform your complex character choices. Take a minute, do that, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Working in Spline: Right now we have the run, the jump, the dive, and then right here, the character puts their hands on the ground and then nothing. There's no keyframe data. So we just have interpolation over to here where the character resumes their run. So in between, the character runs, jumps, rolls, and then floats into the next pose. There's no mechanics, there's no motion. If we look at it in screen space, you can see that the character just glides along the floor. Not great. We have some stuff to do. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with the hips. I'm going to pull up the graph editor, and I'm also going to reduce how many frames I'm staring at. I'm just going to jump over here to 88, which is the frame where the character is on the ground, and we'll end it around around 111 inch. Actually, maybe I'll get a couple extra frames just so I can see where we're coming from. There. So I can see the momentum that we're entering this pose with, then nothing, and then the ending. Because we have an A pose and a B pose, like the character has somewhere to go, it makes it a little bit easier to know what direction the characters going in, what the translate Z is going to look like in this situation because the characters just kind of moving forward. There's not a whole lot I have to do here. If you are starting from scratch, I would have no keyframe data on the back end. I guess I would have all these keys to deal with. Like that, I would end up in this situation where I'm at frame 88 or in this pose, and then there's nothing. So if I were coming from nothing, I'd probably start with moving the character forward and up to their standing position, which is pretty much where I'm going to leave it so if I undo that deletion, I've got my key frames back, that's pretty much what I've got here. I've just got the character moving forward and up and back into a standing position, and that's good enough for now. Now, to get to that spot, I'm going to grab the hips or the main mover, the cog center of gravity, and I'm just going to focus on the up and the down and the forward in the back. I want to have the character jump up into the air and then come down into the step right here where they'll continue to run. I'm just going to focus on the down and the up for a second. I'm going to push the character. I'll just use Translate Y. I will set a key in my graph editor, and I'll just push this down to keep the character lower. I'm also going to set these to Auto so that they aren't making creative decisions for me. I don't want those plans doing their own thing. So keep the character kind of low. I'll also maybe keep the character back a little bit. So that they have to work their way out and then they'll accelerate as they move. From here, the other thing I want to do frame. I use 94, just for fun. I'm just picking a frame at random, but what I feel like timing wise, I want to use. I think I'm going to establish the feet locking in place. It's very distracting having them sliding all over the place. I'm going to say whichever foot is the front one, which is going to be this one over here, the character's left foot, the blue one. That foot pose, since it's the farthest forward foot, it's most likely going to still be there on frame 94. This other foot that's in the back is probably going to have to come off the ground by that point. I don't know what it's going to do just yet, but I can guess that this one here might still reach. I'm going to go ahead and grab my keyframe data from here, copy, paste it so that that foot does not move. Pull it over here. I want to keep it planted in that position. Now, it doesn't have to stay in that exact pose. I'm going to come in here, grab the tilt up control, the foot roll, and let that foot roll forward. But that way I can have the character getting ready to jump. Maybe what I'll do is I'll use this in a hybrid approach, and I'll start thinking about the pose that I might want to have happen here. I'll have the character come forward like that Then I'm going to take this other foot as well, and I'm going to say, it was here, how long can I keep it there? This is a trick that I use a lot for this stuff where I'll take the backfoot. I'll find where that keyframe is where it's locked on the floor. I'll copy, and I'll just paste that keyframe here. Now, I just jumped arbitrarily into the future and dropped a keyframe. Clearly, that foot can't still have a value of whatever this keyframe data suggests because the foot does not reach. It doesn't work. So, rather than reposition it and try to figure out, well, where should the foot be on this frame? I don't know yet. But what I do know is that it's going to stay there for some amount of time, but how long do I let it lock there? Well, it works here on frame 91. Frame 92 questionable. Let's start there. So I'll take this keyframe that I duplicated. I'll move it back to 92, we'll just see if I can make it work. If on 92, I roll the foot a little bit further, it's almost there. I can maybe adjust the hips if I want to to get that knee to re engage. I could try to push the foot more bent up or I could just manually create a bend in the knee if I really need to, depending on the rig. In this case, I'm going to say, You know what? Let's go ahead and take the translate Z, and I'm going to pull it back just a little bit to keep it there for that frame. So here, I'll just keep that foot in position until wherever it feels like it needs to come away. I think I'm at about 92. I'll adjust the hips a little bit just to pull them back. I'm also going to remember that the hips themselves might need to rotate a little bit. I could use various controls and different things. But one of the main points of layered is not to get too in the weeds of getting the specific poses, the specific controls, and getting everything perfect. I'm just trying to layer in the general idea. So for me, I think that is a decent enough spot for that to go. Then I've got my foot I'm going to go ahead and just say, it's somewhere up in the air. Where? I don't know. I won't worry about it yet. The foot comes up, goes like that. Eventually, it is that right foot that's going to land on the floor. I'm going to say that at some point, whatever this keyframe is going to do the same thing in reverse. That is where that foot lands. At some point around here, I'll try to put that foot there. I'll reposition it. Then I will put the foot in a stepping position, maybe like that. Now I have a roll control and a foot control. Both of these are relevant. This keyframe is important. This is my contact pose. It might not be on the right frame though. That's very stretched out. I'm just going to take this, move a frame forward. That looks like it might be right because here it looks like we're standing on the foot. I'm going to say, 104, we'll use this. I'll adjust this to look a little bit better and maybe I'll back it up a tiny bit so that knee re engages. Cool. Now as a frame 105, I'm just going to say copy, paste the down position once again of the foot, and I'm going to make sure that this is not rotated. This is I think 360. It's not zero because the character did a whole front flip, which means the foot has over rotated 360. But I do know I want translate Y on the floor. I don't think I want the toes tilted up either. Go ahead and key that there. What I can do here is I can start to introduce the jump. I'll just go somewhere in the middle here to get my jump. I'll just go in the middle frame 100. Sure we can always move the key and just up you go. I don't know how high to go necessarily I can compare the rest of my character's movement. I'll just go a little higher than usual. Set that to Auto. Now the character will come up this way. You smooth those out. Jump and down. Then I'll just go back and forth between the feet, the hips, and any of the main things that move most of the character's body. I'm not going to worry about things like the arms or the head just yet. So I have pretty much just kept going with what we were doing. I've exaggerated things a little bit more, just added more details. When it plays, it looks like this, and it's exactly what we were just doing just with a little bit more refinement. If I now look at the finished curve of the body, you can see that we pretty much have the same curve here. The hips stay down for a little bit, they shoot up into the air, we get our hang time, and then it drops down and dips into a slightly bigger down pose. Then back into the run. Now, the arc of the hands is still not perfect. We definitely could adjust that. If I go into my little animation shelf up here at the top of Maya, with the hand selected, I can hit this button to create a motion path. Here's a tip for you. Because I'm switching from FK and IK, there is IK on the floor, goes back to FK in the air. FK and IK are two different sets of controls, which means if you try to track them, you can see that my IK control goes away. So let me select that motion trail and get rid of it. When you're trying to track hands specifically, it's usually smarter to track a finger. Because the fingers are not FK IK specific. They'll be there either way, you can see here. The arc of the hand could be better, could definitely make that cleaner. It's a little bit pointy here on 95, so there's still work to be done and still more adjustments to be made. But hopefully now you can see that this is a process of layering things in as we go, focusing on the big stuff first so that the overall idea is coming through, and then you can always work on those smaller details as we go. If I were to have done the hand first and started with that, everything I would have done with the body would have gotten rid of all that work. This is the point of a layered workflow. You can start to see the shot coming together sooner. Working in spine allows us to preview our motion as we go and it gives you a really good sense of the timing and the spacing of your work while you're working on it. If this is your first time using a layered workflow and you want some more practice on top of what we've done in class, I'd recommend doing small assignments, really easy to finish manageable things like a weight shift, a character just standing on one leg and then stepping onto the other leg. Little things like that where you can focus on the hip motion, and then you can focus on foot contacts, those are usually the best places to start the hips and the feet. If you're doing this with an acting shot, focus on just this part of the body, just the main bust of your character and deal with the head rotation and any major changes in the face to start off with and start to layer the little stuff as you go. 8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing this class. I know that learning a new software and diving right into complex animations can be a lot, and you did it. To recap some of the things that you accomplished, we dove into Maya. We learned the UI, we set up character, we set up our settings. You're really ready to use Maya for anything going forward. Now you have a new workflow under your belt, the layered technique, which is something that will take some practice to get used to. If it feels a little shaky, it's just a practice thing, and also you might just be a pose-to-pose animator. It's a good thing to try these different workflows. Whatever you made, regardless of how it went, please share it in the project gallery. I'd really love to see it. I can't wait to see you in the next class.