Coming from a 2d animation background with Flash and Toonboom,I find drawing my frames efficient as I draw my characters exactly the way I want them to move.The disadvantage is the time it takes to draw say a 2 minutes animation,is way longer and ur hand gets tired bigtime.

Now,in getting into Maya for serious 3d animation,I realized everytime I make some key poses on the time slider,the movement when I do a playback is messed up as the timing is incorrect.I readjust the keys to match the timing I want but things are still off.So,I open up the graph editor,and start tweaking curves(frustrating and time consuming).Then I realised,there is a way I could animate freely,I could just make my tangent settings for all my curves to be stepped rather than linear or flat and start posing my character for every frame.If I want to ease in,I pose the movement more closely together exactly from a 2d animation approach rather than tweaking curves but someone pointed out that too many keys in the time slider might be problematic for Maya to compute.
Is that true?

In many games, final animation keyframes are baked out per frame when exported, 30fps in many cases. So I don't think the number of keys would be an issues for most engines, but it can be a pain in the ass for editing in your app of choice.

It wouldn't problem upon export, but depending on how long the animation is in Maya, Maya could puke on it occasionally. Then again, Maya pukes on everything, so just remember to save often.

I wish I could picture what's happening more so I can help. Perhaps make a video with Jing? The graph editor should be working for you, not against you. Ease in/out is really easy with the graph.

the amount of data/memory/performance is not going to be an issue if you choose to key everything every frame ... the amount of work how ever will be.

id strongly advice to get used to the curves and try to master them !

Thanks for the reply guys.I think I will try to learn the curves but when it comes to complex animation pose by pose for almost every frames will work for me probably till I get how these curves work.

As far as I know most modern game animation systems dont want frames, they use keys and bezier curves just like animation authoring systems. If you were to bake an animation into frames and import it into a modern game engine that does more than a linear interpolation it would be quite wasteful. In the past it was more common to use frame based animation in games because the animations could be sampled with a simple 3d lerp, or even have no interpolation at all, and because the keys are at a fixed interval its easy to tell what 2 keys the sample time is between.

These days calculating a bezier interpolation isnt too much work and is going to be a lot better for memory, plus you get exactly what you had in the authoring software. Some engines do have a key reduction process if you did want to export frames for some reason, like to include movements of an advanced rig.

To expand on what has already been said I recommend you take a look at animation layers in Maya.

If you decide to go full madness and key every frame it will be a pain in the ass to adjust arcs. If you make an animation layer you can offset your existing animation with a couple of frames which blends nicely.

The same method is often used to exaggerate motion capture which usually has keys on every frame.

It won't be a problem to adjust arcs as you won't need the graph editor anymore.All the frames are keyed at a specific position for every frame(its something u learn when animating in 2d,u know what pose at each frame makes a movement fluid).If you observe the works on a 2d animator that switched to 3d as I read in one article,can't remember where I read it.He applied the same approach as in 2d animation and his work looked more fluid,
Using arcs and curves distracts u from focusing on the animation itself,making it technical.There is a trick to this,u could animate frame by frame using 12fps and later scale the keys to match a 24fps animation.

I am just gonna try this out.I am just tired of seeing my animation looking off and thats because of some curve not smooth or linear and u have to know if its the translate x,y or z curve or the rotate or any other parameter.Just pose the damn 3d model frame by frame and no need to open that graph editor.You should be in control of your own animation and not Maya dictating to u how u should animate.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't use the curves for simple tween movements,like door rotating,or mechanical gear stuff.

3d animation is supposed to be resolutionless. The only reason animation packages even have frames is because they were originally designed for film. Keying every "frame" could cause a lot of problems. For instance if you used stepped interpolation it might break motion blur calculations, and if for some reason you need to change the frame rate you have to do a huge amount of work to fix the animation. If the animations are meant for games the engine probably expects normal resolutionless keys with curves and having a stepped key at every 1/30 seconds will make your animation look like its playing at a slower speed than the game is. Its also going to waste a lot of memory which could be really bad on low memory systems like xbox360/ps3.

O-o0.Did I forget to mention this is actually for an animation and not for a game?

Most games nowadays are cheorographed with motion capture devices which keys every frame and then the animator starts to break them into simpler keys,some of the animation is lost with the keys removed but the important keys are kept.

I did read somewhere in the help that Maya might find it difficult to compute too many keys in the slider so try and keep ur curves as simple as possible but from what the other posters have said.It won't be an issue.

I still recommend you take a look at animation layers no matter what approach you choose to work with. Sometimes it happens that you want to exaggerate a pose in an almost finished animation but keep the timings. In such a case it takes a couple of seconds to adjust with an animation layer frame rather than modifying maybe 5 or even 10 surrounding frames.

Think of it as an offset/exaggeration tool.

Some answers here are a bit surprising - I think that there is some confusion going on between frame as in "30 frames per second" and frame as in "pose" or "beat".

Melviso : I have seen many pro game animators (often coming from a film background) using the technique you described, that is to say, working with stepped keys then only later smoothing things out, instead of going for the interpolated curve stuff right away. Their results were always consistently superior to other animators not lucky enough to have film experience. The ones not focusing on good basic poses often end up with weird floaty animations, fluid for sure but very often going against basic rules of balance and rythmic timing.

Originally Posted by pior

Melviso : I have seen many pro game animators (often coming from a film background) using the technique you described, that is to say, working with stepped keys then only later smoothing things out, instead of going for the interpolated curve stuff right away. Their results were always consistently superior to other animators not lucky enough to have film experience. The ones not focusing on good basic poses often end up with weird floaty animations, fluid for sure but very often going against basic rules of balance and rythmic timing.

Yes keying the extreme poses with stepped interpolation so your not distracted by the broken, untweaked interpolation. Then going back and fixing the interpolation and add keys as needed. Thats way different than putting a key at every "frame" to attempt to create a smooth animation.

Originally Posted by pior

Melviso : I have seen many pro game animators (often coming from a film background) using the technique you described, that is to say, working with stepped keys then only later smoothing things out, instead of going for the interpolated curve stuff right away. Their results were always consistently superior to other animators not lucky enough to have film experience. The ones not focusing on good basic poses often end up with weird floaty animations, fluid for sure but very often going against basic rules of balance and rythmic timing.

Exactly,its like you understand what I am saying.Posing a model frame by frame may sound like a lot of work for most 3d animators but it is nothing for 2d animators as they draw everything frame by frame.With 3d,they do not need to draw anymore.Here,they can pose characters very fast incoporating all the principles of animation like weight,rythmn into their work as they pose.Its the easiest way to animate random motions,rather than everything looking repetitive and the animation looks more believable and fluid.
Most of them who use arcs didn't really come from a 2d animation background.There are some 2d animators that are so good,they just keep on drawing frames(straight ahead frame by frame) of a character's movement without doing a playback or test for say 1 min of that animation and when they finally do a playback,everything looks perfecto.
It also enables u to focus on the animation in general,rather than focusing on a certain part you are animating like a character looking upwards,u tweak the rotate y curve to create an ease in.Then u animate the shoulders and tweak curves,animate the eyes and tweak curves.
Frame by frame:you pose the head,shoulders,eyes,even hair movement as you key each frame,no need for those damn curves,you can create random movement of the shoulders as the head moves upwards,get the hair over the face e.t.c.Its something that comes with 2d animation practice.I remember somebody saying in order to be a really good 3d animator,learning 2d animation first is an added advantage cause you learn all the tricks and understand the principles of animation better.