The ability to edit animation clips non-destructively
is an important factor when working in an iterative workflow.
It allows an animator to create and compare many different variations of a scene
in a short amount of time.
In Maya 2017, you can accomplish this via the Time Editor.
In this movie, we’ll show you how to store your basic animation as a clip,
then layer non-destructive edits on top of it in order to create variations.
Start by setting your current project to the provided scene folder,
then load the file “flight_deck.ma”.
The scene depicts the deck of a futuristic flight deck as well as a ship.
It’ll be our job to populate it with a crew.
To prepare for working in the Time Editor, switch to the Animation workspace.
This will automatically optimize the layout of your menus and editors for working with animation.
Note that the Time Editor appears at the bottom here, alongside the Graph Editor.
Now import the file “crew_man.ma”, making sure to retain namespaces.
This is just a basic character model already skinned to a skeleton.
Also import the file “ship_work_anim.ma”.
If you play through the scene, you can see that this contains an animated proxy rig.
Proxy rigs are great for performance,
but now we need to get the animation onto our final character.
We’ll start by creating a clip of the animation by right-clicking its control set in the Outliner
and selecting its set members. This selects all the character’s control curves.
Now in the Time Editor, click Add selected content from the scene.
Maya adds a clip to the Time Editor,
which becomes the new driving force for animation of the selected control curves.
You can see this if you expand the clip.
Notice there are keys for all the objects and attributes that originally had keyframes.
Meanwhile if you select a control, the keyframes have changed from red to beige
to denote that they are now driven by the clip.
This means that if you ever delete the clip, the rig will no longer animate.
However, this also means that you can do things like mute, move, scale, or trim the clip.
For a full list of the ways that you can interact with clips, see the Maya Documentation.
For now though, let’s remap this clip to our skinned character.
Select the clip,
then in the Time Editor go to Clip > Remap and Create Clip for Namespace > :crew_man.
Maya displays the Roster Mapper. This shows exactly how the attributes from our animated rig
will be mapped to those of the skinned rig.
By default, Maya automatically maps any attributes found in the namespace,
which appear in the Mapped section.
You can also manually map attributes by selecting them in the Unmapped section
and then clicking the Map button to add them.
In this case we won’t need to do that since our rigs match perfectly, so just click Continue.
Maya creates a new clip for your skinned rig. Now if you play the scene,
you can see that the animation is identical on both.
Rename the new track so you don’t get confused later on.
You can also delete the proxy rig and associated clip.
Next, we’d like to loop the animation of him working on the ship to make it longer.
The loopable portion of that animation is from about frame 46 to frame 95.
So go to frame 46 and split the clip using this button.
Now to loop just the second clip,
we’ll first need to set the Edge Edit mode to Loop via the button here.
Other options include Scale and Trim.
Now just drag the right side of the clip for as long as you want.
Once you’re done, select both clips and group them together using this button.
Rename the group appropriately.
This will keep the Time Editor tidy, and allow us to position both clips together.
To do that, select the group and create a relocator on top of it
via the Relocate > Create Relocator menu.
This adds a relocator object to the scene at the character’s root.
Use the transform tools to reposition him next to this ship.
Note that this relocator is non-destructive to your animation clip.
If you were to delete the node at any time, either in the Outliner
or via the Relocate > Remove Relocator menu, the animation would return to its original position.
We’re not done yet though.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the character can’t quite reach the part of the ship
he’s supposed to be working on.
We’ll need to animate him getting up on his toes,
but like the relocation we’d like to do this non- destructively
in order to preserve our original animation.
We can do this by first selecting his foot, waist, and hand controls,
and then selecting the group and adding a layer on top of it
either by right-clicking or going to the Clip menu.
There are two types of layers we can add:
an Override layer, which records keys relative to the base skeleton (without animation),
or an Additive layer, which records keys on top of our existing animation.
Let’s go with an Additive layer. This adds a grey layer clip on top of our existing one.
Make sure to select this layer before doing anything.
Once you have, then keyframe the worker standing on his toes.
Notice that when you expand the layer, those keyframes appear in it.
Once finished, you can mute and unmute the layer to hide or show the tweaks.
Also take note of the Weight attribute,
which you can adjust to determine how much of an impact the layer has on the base animation.
Because you can keyframe it too, you can use the Weight to fade the effect in and out.
Suppose you want to try a different variation in which our character doesn’t stand on his toes,
but instead steps onto a small box for leverage. We can animate that on a separate layer.
Rename the current layer then mute it.
Again select all the foot, waist, and hand controls to create another Additive layer.
As before, select this layer and keyframe an animation of him stepping onto a box.
Use a cube as a stand-in for reference.
Also note how this time we need to offset the knee controls as well.
You can add them to the layer by selecting them
and then right-clicking the layer to display the appropriate menu.
Note that you can use the Graph Editor to make adjustments to the keys
just like you would in a typical animation workflow.
Now you can quickly swap between animations by muting and unmuting their respective layers,
which is a handy way of comparing them without destroying your original clip.
Now that we have our various animations, we need to export them.
Exporting in the Time Editor will bake any currently visible clips and their respective layers
into a single animation clip.
This will make it easy to save each variation of the scene as its own file.
Start with the worker on his toes.
Select the clip and go to File > Export Selected in the Time Editor.
In the options, export as a .ma file.
Notice we also have this Save Thumbnail/Playblast option.
This will allow us to create a preview that will show up in the Content Browser.
Click the Capture Thumbnail/Playblast button.
By default this starts in Capture mode,
so position the camera in the workspace and click the Capture button.
Use the Preview below to make adjustments as necessary.
We could stop at just a still shot, but instead let’s create an animated preview.
Change Type to Playblast, then set the Frame range to whatever you desire.
Click capture again.
Once playblasted, try clicking the small play button in the Preview window
to double-check that it looks the way you want, then click Save.
Export the clip as “crewman_variation1.ma”.
Now if you open the Content Browser,
you can see that the clip appears in the Clip Exports folder of your project.
If you mouse over it, it animates with the playblast we recorded.
Now your TD can import this clip into the original scene to view your variation.
Repeat the same steps to export the step layer.