Clips to Keys a mess (Maya)

[Snowfly]

I have a little problem with blending clips in Trax...I have a bunch of animations that I turned into clips for organizations sake, but I need the keys to exist in the timeline to export to the Unreal engine. So I arrange the clips in Trax, merge everything into one big clip and Activate the clip to make the keyframes appear in the timeline. Problem is, on every section where I have overlapping clips blended together, I get a keyframe on every frame, making it very hard to edit the curves, and I'm not sure if its optimal for the game engine either (although I'll have to check if ActorX keyframes every frame anyway.)

I have quite a number of blended animations so any method to create clean blended clips I'd really appreciate...as much as possible I don't want to have to reanimate the derivative animations by hand.

[Scott Ruggels]

What version of Maya are you using? versions before Maya 6, the clip system is just about unuseable. Not worth a bother. What we did instead is use a mel script called "pose2shelf", and "Selection2shelf" that will take a rigged character and move the pose to the animation shelf. You can make selections into buttons, and save poses. Thes sub selections you /can/ make into character sets, but for Actor-X it's best to make the whole one charagter into a character set. But even with the best braisn in our company, we could not get anything in May 4.5 trax to be worth anything, and by Maya 6, they fixed Trax, but we moved beyond it. I can post the scripts if youwant them.


Scott

[Snowfly]

I'm using 4.5. Yes please, post those scripts, I could probably use them.

So what I get essentially is a pose to pose animation workflow, right? I save out a selection (which could be all relevant keys on the legs for example) and save poses from the blended clips, and load them back in as regular keyframes. And then it's back to the graph editor as usual. Sorry, just to clarifying things to myself... /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Shame about Trax, Clips seemed suited to game animation work, maybe as source data for an exporter.

[Scott Ruggels]

Clips was just broken.

I will post the Scripts when I get to work.

Okay basically you will be doing "pose to Pose" such as making the "Base Ready Pose" with all of the "manipulators" or the base skeleton selected and convert that pose a button on the shelf. You can also select all the manipulators, or a "subset" of the manipulators and that become a button as well. So then you can pose the character either as a whole chaaracter, or a subset. But the number of frames you can, or want to put on the shelf is limited by your patience for scrolling through the toolbar. I tend to only put the Idle, or ready poses, and 6 Keys of a run or 8 of a walk on the shelf per model.

But yes, clips are broken in 4.5. Try to make a character walk, then turn 90 degrees and walk in the news direction.

Scott

[Scott Ruggels]

Herte's the zip of the script.
http://www.rdwarf.com/edbado/Unfriendly/Polycount/pose2shelf.zip

If you have any firther questions, please ask.

Scott

[Snowfly]

Thanks Scott, I'm using it now. Very simple & elegant solution. No questions so far.

[Scott Ruggels]

More than welcome. It's often the simplest proceedures that produce the best results.

Scott