EVERY ANIMATOR HAS RUN INTO PROBLEMS with a rig at some point in their career. be it a hidden controller or bad weighting, a rig problem can ruin your day quickly. this is why knowing a few cheats about rigs is a good idea. in the latest version of maya, these rig cheats are ultra stable and time-saving. You'll (hopefully) never again be working on a scene only to be stopped in your tracks by a misbehaving skeleton. We've scoured the web to find a few new rigs to include with this edition of how to Cheat in maya, so let's go ahead and dive into the best rigs the web has to offer and see what we can find…
LET'S FIRST RUN THROUGH a few of the things you should identify in your rigs before you start working with them.
In an ideal production setting, you are given enough time to test your rigs before you have to animate shots. This is in an ideal setting. Not very many productions are ideal! Schedule sometimes demands that you are producing work on day one. When the deadlines are that tight, we need to have a quick list of things to check to make sure our rigs are going to behave how we want them to.
Some of these cheats will reveal characteristics about a rig that aren't necessarily an indication that the rig is broken or low quality. These characteristics might include scaling breaking after a certain point, IK/FK switch channels being on the same control that you are using frequently for posing, or proxy meshes hidden in the rig. It would be quite a shame if you completed a shot using a new rig only to see later on that an attribute or parameter was set incorrectly.
Since all rigs are slightly different, the locations, names, and even geometry type of the controls we point out in the following cheats may not be the same in your production rigs. However, there is a certain amount of standardization inherent in rigging, and we'll expect you can always find the “IK hand controller”, or the “FK head controller” no matter what character you're working with. To get used to this, in this chapter we'll use the semi-standardized names to describe the rigs.
If you look closely, the arm's object space is not aligned with the feet or the pelvis. What this means is we need to be careful when we are posing the character, especially in cycles, because this rig was not set up with “FORWARD” being represented by only the Translate Z channel. Below you can see that if we move the controllers in the Z channel alone, the results are totally unpredictable. This rig would be very unwieldy if we used IK arms in a walk cycle. If you must use this character with arms IK mode, then it's easiest to pose the character using “WORLD” translation mode by holding down and LMB-dragging to the left on the marking menu that appears. Also, the infinity curve type will be “cycle with offset” for all three translation channels (not just Z like normal) for a character like this. More on that in Chapter 9, Cycles.
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You can also check in the channel box to see if all world controllers are moving in world space by moving them, and then selecting each individually and seeing if the values change.
RIGS CAN HAVE IDIOSYNCRACIES that you come to learn over time. We took a look at the Groggy rig in the last section and found that IK arms will require us to have a few extra steps to make our cycles perfect (again, more on that in the “Stride Length” section in Chapter 9). There are many reasons that rigs have different characteristics though. Different proportions, the rigging pose, and the general use for the rig (some rigs are designed to be able to blend mocap data into a robust control system, e.g.). But there ARE a few things that pretty much all rigs should have under control, pun intended.
The first is that setting all of the controller's attributes to zero, or “zeroing”, puts the rig back into the initial pose. This is vitally important for avoiding gimbal lock while animating, dealing with animation curves while you are polishing your scene, and creating cycles with a set stride length.
The second requirement is that animation can be copied and pasted on the rig. With most rigs, this works fine. However, sometimes rigs have very complex hierarchies filled with connections and nested constraints that mean that your animation is not copied perfectly. We'll try both AnimExport and good ol' Copy Keys to get to the bottom of this.
While many of the quirks of a rig are workable, such as the slightly different object space on Groggy's IK hands, some things are show stoppers. Let's see how this rig stacks up on these two essential issues.
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The Attribute Spreadsheet is very underutilized. Spend some time making changes to multiple cells by shift-selecting them, or by dragging a selection box on an area and typing in values.
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At its core, Maya handles AnimExport and Copy Keys the same way. One just writes a file and the other stores it in your clipboard. The nice thing about Copy Keys is you don't have to hunt for the saved file, AND, you can copy keys from one scene and open another scene to paste them into — Maya keeps the curves in the clipboard.
ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to cheat in animation is to take advantage of the fact that Maya interpolates motion for you. For example, in 2D animation done for TV, it is still typical for the animation to be done on “2's” — every other frame is held for two frames, giving you effectively 12 frames per second instead of the normal 24. Well, this looks choppy to the well trained eye. In 3D, unless we are using stepped mode, there will ALWAYS be motion on every frame. When people say “on 2's” in Maya, what they mean is they have set key poses every two frames — but there is still motion on every frame.
The way we can cheat using this property of 3D is to “spruce up” a rig with some dynamic objects. We can get away with using far fewer poses and less movement, because the dynamic objects will be constantly moving. It will take away the choppy feeling and make it look like the “world” in which the character is living is smooth and continuous, even with staccato movement in the character itself.
We're going to take a scene that has VERY crude animation on Moom, and add a ponytail and earrings using two very different dynamic methods. You will then see when we play back the animation, that the scene has taken on a more dynamic quality. The mere addition of these dynamic objects and the secondary motion they create helps us cheat the animation. When you are on extremely tight deadlines and can only afford the time to set a few key poses in a shot, this cheat will save you.
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Depending on your computer performance, you may not be able to watch the dynamics play at speed. Maya solves dynamics in real time, so normally every frame must play. To watch complex dynamics or to watch on a slower machine, change your playback to “Every Frame” in the time slider preferences.
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The Nail Constraint is the perfect dynamic constraint for swinging objects like earrings. There are many other types of dynamic constraints and I encourage you to try them all. Hinge Constraints are like Nail Constraints but they only rotate on one axis, and Spring Constraints are like Nail Constraints but they stretch!
NO MATTER WHAT TYPE OF ANIMATION YOU DO, chances are your character will interact with props quite often. To make sure that you are not animating the wrong object, most props should be rigged. There's a little bit of an art and a science to rigging props, but I've simplified it down to this simple cheat to get you back to animating as soon as possible.
Since we are also using a referencing pipeline, rigging props allows you to turn the prop file into a format that can be standardized across multiple scenes. Instead of bare geometry floating around in your shot, using this cheat you will be able to create an asset that all the animators working with you can utilize.
We start by creating a group that will hold all of the geometry for the prop. This is done so that no matter what is added to the prop, the rig will still function in all of the scenes that it has been referenced into. Next we create a simple controller that will move the prop around. Last, we group all of the controls, geometry, and other nodes into a single group and name it our rig.
In a production, animators should know how to rig their own props so that if there is a need to do so, you are not taking valuable time away from the character riggers. Any time you can troubleshoot your own scenes, take care of problems, and put out fires yourself, you are proving how valuable an asset you are to your company. Cheating is job security!
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In general, you want to use the scale of the controller only if it is animated. The overall scale of the prop (sizing the prop relative to the scene) should be done using the rig group, not the controller.
by Kenny Roy
IN ORDER TO GET ALL OF THE NECESSARY INFORMATION from a piece of dialog, you need to listen closely. VERY closely. Now even closer still. you are probably already breaking down your audio files phonetically, and making notes on the inflection and intonation, but you are missing a lot of the magic in the noise…
Have you noticed that some animation just really seems to “nail” the dialog? that's because the animator is picking up on a myriad of other things in the sound file that go unnoticed to the novice animator. While they are nearly impossible to point out, combined these little nuances really bring the audience into the scene. here's how to find them.
First, listen for the “anchors”. anchors are what I like to call all of the NON¬VERBAL sounds that the character is making. these could be breaths, pauses, stutters, mutterings, lip smackings, breathing sounds, puff sounds, teeth clicking, tongue snapping, interrupted words, repetition, grunting, growling, harsh delivery or odd emphasis in the middle of a word, a rasp in the voice, loss of air or voice cutting out, and many, many more. these non-verbal sounds, when animated correctly, really “anchor” the character into the scene, which is why I like to call them that name. It solidifies the character by making them seem like they truly are breathing the air in the scene, and creating noises with their bodies. Without anchors, characters seem to be opening their mouths only to let us hear a radio that is playing sound in their bellies. If you can get the audience to feel like the character is actually creating all of the sounds that we pick up on subconsciously, then your engagement of their attention will be far greater. they will be far more immersed in the scene. anchors have the power to do that. the trick is to animate these anchors much too large for the sound they create, and then tone it down. don't try to be subtle with it; create an exaggerated movement to explain an anchor, then go back into the right size.
Next, listen closely next for the ENERGY of a piece of dialog. the energy will clue you in as to where in your shot you need to rely on subtle movements, and where you should have broader gestures. the energy might not necessarily be expressed in volume, but it might be hidden within the anchors. a waviness in the voice might actually be a result of a character starting to get so angry that their body starts shaking. a character's voice cutting out suddenly could actually be a result of them losing the energy they need to go on and stopping short in exasperation. and the voice crack of a boy in his teen years might make us chuckle, but imagine what his energy would do after that happens. the embarrassment he might feel could lead the energy of the scene to do some interesting things. When you have listened very closely for the cues in energy shifts, you can combine that with the anchors and get some very engaging results.
Last, listen for body movement. you don't want to necessarily get caught in the trap of having to “explain” every single little sound of cloth and feet moving, but if you miss a step (pun intended) you will immediately pull your audience out of the scene. Listening very closely to the movement of the character will give you cues as to how the character needs to be posed. that is, some performances just aren't possible sitting down. Other performances would seem forced if delivered by a standing character. all humans are very adept at piecing together the posture of a character from the sound of the voice. It's built into our dNa to pick up on ultra-subtle cues. things like how much the voice sounds like it is coming from the nasal cavity or deep in the back of the throat can lead us to conclude the character is either standing, or curled into a ball on the ground. a slight muffling of the voice at points in the audio could be explained by a character who is holding their head in their hands, and as the palms cover the mouth briefly, the sound changes. the real point is that animators rarely take all of these clues into consideration and their animation lacks for it.
so first, find literally ALL the sounds the character is making, purposefully or not. If you haven't been adding them before, this first step will add the most to your scenes for the least amount of work. Next, find the energy of the scene in the audio and let the energy dictate some of your animation choices like broadness of movement, and strength of pose. Last, listen even closer to see if you can discern the extremely subtle hints of body position and posture. the audience can detect when you are stretching the character past what the performance can sustain. Implement these three new steps in your audio workflow and see if you are able to get that subtle, hard-to-pinpoint magic that some of the best scenes have.