20 minutes Maya to Blender transition for Maya Animators - BE SMARTER

so i wanted to give blender a shot and how did it go for me he speaks a dozen languages knows every local custom he'll blend in how does anyone here speak english or even ancient creepier actually it went better than that with blender seeing wider and wider adoption by the day and more and more career opportunities developing for character animators who are proficient with this software i think it's worth having a look at how to transition between maya and blender if like me you are familiar with the animation workflow in maya and you would like to transition to blender but you would like to be proficient within a reasonable time frame then this video is for you my name is amedeo beretta and the channel is animation pandemic i started working as a character animator in the early 2000s originally i started maya but then my first job was on lightweight 3d i also had to work in 3d studio max motionbuilder and moto i had to transition a few times between different pieces of software the problem with transitioning between 3d packages is that you have to get used to a new viewport new shortcut and a new way maybe of using regular tools like the graph editor for instance and all of these needs to work with your workflow so in this tutorial we're going to see how to set blender to operate in a way which is similar to the way we operate maya when performing character animation how to set up a basic character animation scene how to set down our first keys in blender how to operate the timeline and the graph editor and all of these with parallel examples from maya so that we get to understand more or less how the two things relate to one another mind you probably my solutions still need refining nevertheless i managed to find myself comfortable enough animating in blender with just a few hours to have blender's viewport behave like mayas you can download this maya config add-on for blender 2.8 from form affinity the add-on is free comes with a nice video tutorial on how to install it and it will take you only a few minutes to install it for any tool and rig i mentioned during the tutorial you will find a link in the description once the add-on is installed your viewport should behave more or less like mayas so left mouse button and alt to rotate middle mouse button and alt to pan and right mouse button alt to zoom if you select an object in the viewport and you press f you will zoom just like maya i have mixed feelings about these tools that make blender work like maya because i don't know exactly what i'm missing now i am pretty sure that like any 3d package blender has some things which are good and some things which are less polished so i'm wondering if by using a script to make blender behave like maya i am missing out on the good stuff of blender so this is something to keep in mind in my opinion we use the tools to convert blender to maya so to speak to speed up our transition but i still don't know if in the long run this is going to be a good decision for a comprehensive overview of the way the interface works in blender i really suggest you watch blender's own interface overview back to blender the first time you will open blender it will open up with a cube which you can left mouse select now and hit delete to remove the cube from the scene the outliner is here in the top right corner of the window and you have this box which is part of the addon in maya the first thing you do when you want to animate the scene is set the project blender doesn't quite work the same way because blender files are in fact archives they already contain a project of their own right after setting a project in maya you normally go file and you create a reference with your rig and you find yourself ready to animate in blender first we need rape we are going to download this ball rig with squash and stretch for blender 2.8 head over to gumroad and download the rig you will find the link in the description of the video first of all we want to open the rig to see how that's built so i'm going to go file open i don't save this scene i don't need it and i'm going to open the rig file the rig file is called balls for 2.80. blend and if you look at the video of the rig the rig had plenty of textures so you have these four buttons on the top right side of the viewport the first one is wireframe like in maya the second one is shaded without textures and then we have the textured one and then we have the render itself so you see the textures are there contrary to what would happen with a maya file we did not download any texture that's because the textures are included somehow in the blender file at this time in order to link bricks into an animation scene blender relies heavily on collections so let's see in the outliner how we can sort things out we definitely don't need the ground in a rig right this rig was probably designed to be used within itself not with linking we probably don't need the camera light so i will click on it with the left mouse button and delete the collection all these box icons that you see in here are collections they work more or less like groups in maya and we want to make a new collection to contain the whole of the rig to make a collection you may click on the scene collection first so that you are in the main collection and then you click on the new collection button on the top right corner of the outliner that creates a new collection which we are going to call my rig so that we know that's the collection we are playing with and then we are going to shift select all of the collections we have left in the scene so the ball the obstacle costumes and bone and custom shapes and we are going to left mouse drag them into my rig so in maya you drag objects with the middle mouse button in blender you do it with the left mouse button you see that now our rig is included in the main collection you see there's a floor in there which i don't really need so i can delete it i also don't need the camera and the light but if i select them in the outliner and hit delete they won't go away so i have to right click and go on delete from the menu i don't know why is that there you go now the rig is ready and i'm going to go file again save as and i'm going to save this thing as rig underscore ball underscore version 2 because i already have a version 1 and now i can hit save as let's start an animation scene like in maya so from an empty scene we're going to reference this rig so we go file new general we're going to delete this cube now i would like to reference the rig in my new empty scene so i'm going to go file link i'm going to pick rig bold002 rickball002blend the one file i've just saved remember so i click on link and you see that unlike maya where at this stage i would have the rig in my file i still need to pick a selection there by double clicking on the file itself or by clicking on link i now opened a whole new bunch of folders in fact that file is indeed an archive and itself contains the project which is one of the key differences between maya and blender now what we are going to link in here is collections going to the collection folder and you see i find all the collections plus my rig the one i stored just earlier on so i'm going to click on my rig and i'm going to click on link if i click on this icon on the top right corner of the screen i can go into viewer shading and i can find my textures right there so at this stage the rig is linked before animating it we need to select the collection of my rig then go at the top left side of the viewport onto object click on it with the left mouse button go down to relations and make proxy you have to pick the collections that you want to make a proxy and i will pick rig there you go the rig snaps back to the center of the grid now we are ready to animate so this will be at the moment the equivalent of referencing a rig in maya so maybe let's build a floor so if i hit shift a on my keyboard i can create objects i can go mesh cube and as my cube in there i will hit w and i will move down the cube i can hit r and i can scale in one direction and in another so keys you would expect to be able to just grab the rig and move it around but before setting down keys you have to select your proxy rig in the outliner and then you go on to object mode on the top left corner of the screen and you go into pose mode now i can select the main controller and i have a little bit of a problem here because in this particular rig i don't see the selection highlight and i don't know why that is because i'm just too fresh on blender i will still work nevertheless on frame one i will move up the sphere and to set down a key you have to press i on your keyboard and this menu lets you set the key on location that is translation i again and you set a key on rotation and i again and use a key on scaling this is not very fast although i really like the fact that this menu shows up where i need it it feels a lot more lightweight than a hotbox in maya for instance this way of setting down keys is not very efficient so let's make it more so when you press i on your keyboard and you load these menu you're actually engaging in the keying sets from blender keying sets can be found here on the left hand side of the dope sheet or timeline if you click on the drop down menu these are the keying sets one thing that they do is they let you keys specific channels of your rig so for instance if i set this active key set to location whenever i select a control and press i you see the key on the transform channel if i don't see this sort of channel box i can press n on my keyboard end like november and that will show the channel box the problem with this key in sets is that if you open up a new scene these key sets will be reset again so you're back to scratch whenever you will press i you will be left with this menu which is as i said not very efficient so to make this faster let's remap a couple of things in here we can go under edit preferences and here under keymap we can choose the shortcuts and we can type in insert keyframes and you see that we have several insert keyframes functions and that's because hotkeys like menus in blender are context-based meaning that a hotkey will work in a certain way in the viewport but as you move your cursor into another say section of the ui that hotkey means something else which is an incredibly good feature in my opinion as well as a frightening one so let's change this key anyway and i will find the insert keyframe menu under the push section and i will expand the insert keyframe menu and i will delete the last part underscore menu so that this becomes simply speaking an insert command but we need to specify for which keying set we need to insert a key we will click on the drop down menu next to keying and we will find lock rot and scale from now on whenever i hit i i will in fact set a key for location rotation and scale pretty much like the s key maya more or less because the s key maya can key custom attributes as well as translation rotation and scale while this solution for now is just for translation rotation and scale we are going to do the same for object mode expand the insert keyframe menu remove the underscore menu command there and in keying click on the drop menu and find location rotation and scale i have to thank luciano aka the adventure of lollipop men on youtube and his very good tutorials on how to transition from maya to blender so i suggest you watch them because they're really really useful now i can close the preferences window and if i select a control and press i you'll see i am keying the whole thing not bad this olive green color represents a key if i move the timeline this more saturated green represent a known keyed attribute which however is animated somewhere else if you drag up this window what we're dealing with in here is a dope sheet it's just that you don't see it yet you have to click on this little arrow on the left hand side of the dope sheet and the summary will open up you can expand the summary and that's your current selection in the dope sheet if i want to set another key i can press i and you see that now if i press i in the dope sheet i get a different menu and this time i can key all channels at the same time to delete a keyframe from the dope sheet you select the keyframe you need to delete you hit delete on your keyboard and blender will ask for confirmation do you want to delete keyframes i guess so there are some other attributes in there clean keyframes and clean channels which are essentially ways to resample the curve and reduce keyframes so i'm going to click on delete keyframes if i want to enable auto key this little round button at the center of the timeline is the auto key toggle there so i can now move down the sphere onto the floor and you see the key is set for me in maya if you have auto key set to on like in this case you select your object and that object has no animation on any channel as you translate the object there will be no key laid down this means you're not putting down unwanted animation in the viewport in blender if you have no key in the channels of your character and you translate it and auto key is on auto key will key those channels so you gotta be careful there because it could be very easy for you to mess things up to improve this behavior in my opinion it's worth undoing my key right now and go into edit preferences animation enable this tick box which says only insert available if there is no curve in there you shouldn't be putting down any keyframe there you go now i close if i grab my control and you see there is no animation anymore in here and i move it around auto key is not recording it you see all the key is enabled down here in the timeline before really animating in maya if you remember we have to do a couple of things a we normally go into the animation preferences and we check the playback speed are we playing the animation real time or every frame and also b we are going to the settings of the scene and we're going to see if you're running at 24 frames per second or whatever frame rate we need really in blender that i know of the frame rate is specified under this output properties icon on the right hand side of the screen and down here you have frame start frame and these are rendering settings and then the frame rate itself and in here you can specify the scenes frame rate that's the way i understand it anyway the speed of the playback instead is to be found in the dope sheet so if you click on the drop down menu named playback on the left hand side of the dope sheet you will find that there is an attribute at the top called no sync no sync is the equivalent of playing every frame in maya and then you have av sync which is the equivalent of real-time playback in maya we are going to set our sync rate to av sync so that we will know for sure that blender will try to play this animation in real time blender default hotkey to playback the animation was spacebar however with these new tools that we installed spacebar opens up some sort of hotbox i have animated for a couple of hours in blender with the spacebar set as a playback toggle and to be honest i didn't mind it at all in fact when the script changed the hotkeys to maya i was a bit annoyed because i already got used to the spacebar button you can set the playback button to any button you want to change the hotkey again i can go under edit preferences keymap i will type in play go under play animation click on the hotkey allocation and type in whatever hotkey you want i use alt v maya but it doesn't really matter in here the hotkeys are immediately stored so be careful with that kind of stuff because you don't need to confirm to save a hotkey there the moment you assign it it's assigned so it's a bit dangerous i think in maya to jump between keyframes you hit comma and period by default and to go frame by frame you hit alt comma and alt period in blender you hit up and down arrows to skip between keyframes and left and right arrow to go between frames to duplicate a key in blender you just need to select it in the dope sheet hit ctrl c on your keyboard go to the destination time hit ctrl v and so forth so we can just copy and paste with ctrl c and ctrl v to drag keys in the dope sheet you just use the left mouse button i'm going to very quickly jot down a basic bouncy ball animation there however you see the interpolation is not what we want so graph editor in blender to switch between dope sheet and graph editorial in blender you just hit ctrl tab on your keyboard unfortunately the f button doesn't work in the graph editor because probably the tool to convert blender to maya was made by animator so i didn't think about the graph editor you can remap the buttons so you can still use f in there if you want but you can also hit home on your keyboard to frame all curves i think to be honest home to frame or keys is a bit too far away from any other key on the keyboard now of course if you drag the top side of the ui or the dope sheet you can make it bigger in maya if you want to zoom in the graph editor you just use alt and right mouse button if you want to scale the graph editor non-proportionally you use alt shift and right mouse button vertically and horizontally in blender you can hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard and the middle mouse button you will be able to zoom one way or the other and then you can press the button home to reframe your curves to edit tangency in blender you select the key and then you just drag with the left mouse button your tangent there you see tangents are weighted by defaulting blender you can expand a control in the graph editor and you can click on the channel name to see the curve you gotta be careful if you're dragging a selection like this one you will select even curves which were grayed out if you want to see the curve in solo without the other curves you click on the channel name and you hit shift h on your keyboard that hides any other curve now to break the tangents you just select the keys you want to break the tangents for you hit v like victor on your keyboard and here you can change the tangent type free is the equivalent of breaking tangents in maya that we can operate all tangents together if all keys are selected you can also set the times to linear if you select say these keys in here and press v you can go to vector and that's the equivalent of setting them to linear you can still grab and tweak them without having to change the tangent type let's say that we need to fix this overshooting curve i select the keys i hit period on the numpad and that frames the currently selected keys again i think this key is way too far from the right from the other keys and you want to remap that then i can grab my keys left mouse button select left mouse button button drag press play and we have our animation there if we need to do retime we can hit control tab go back to the dope sheet for instance in here maybe i could fall down a bit faster and bounce back a bit faster as well if you need to retime by scaling you just need to position yourself at the time you want to use as a pivot for the scaling operation you hit s and that's because s used to be the scale operation in blender so again you see that the script didn't really change the shortcuts for the graph editor and now you can just lead the scaling action by moving the cursor on screen you don't even need to hold down the left mouse button or even click on it if you want to snap keys shift s and you can select whatever option you prefer i will choose nearest frame so i have retimed it in maya if you want to drag a key around in the graph editor you just select it and middle mouse drag it around if you want to constrain the translation of a key in the graph editor you hold down shift and your middle mouse drag vertically or horizontally in blender you left mouse select your key left mouse drag it around freely if you want to constrain this translation you left mouse selected you drag it around and you press y and that will constrain you just press it you don't hold it down and that will constrain the key to the vertical axis if you want to constrain it to the horizontal axis you drag it around press x and it will only move horizontally in maya to make a playblast of your animation you right click on the timeline and go playblast in blender you go view in your viewport viewport render animation and you wait of course to see where the animation is stored you go into the output properties of your blender stack on the right hand side of the screen and into output you will find where it's stored which i find it a bit tricky because i would expect the animation to be stored in a project folder somewhere maybe there's a better way of doing it in the same output menu you can change the file format of your playblast to a video and you can change the encoding settings and now a little bit of a neat feature of the graph editor in blender if you grab your curve and you hit t you can change the interpolation of your curves so you can go stepped for instance and all of your curves will go back to step it's worth noticing that changing the interpolation is non-destructive if you hit t and you go back to bezier you will have the same tangents you manually edited earlier on which is a great feature to have in blender you can get some animation for free which is great let's say we just keep the first and the last frame of our animation and we want the ball to bounce to its rest position you just select the two remaining keys you hit t on your keyboard and you click on bounce under dynamic effect that gives you a bounce animation for free if you move this key to the left now you can easily retime your animation which is a great feature to have and it really helps you if you're a generalist and your main focus is an animation for instance the problem with this kind of setup in my opinion is that you cannot really edit the bounds that's the bounce you get and that's it if you wanted to edit the bounce you could select the two keys press alt shift o on your keyboard and the graph editor would do the equivalent of baking the animation in maya you see that we have very weird curves and that's because the bounce dynamic effects is still in action so if you press t and you go back to i don't know bezier for instance then you will get your animation there if you want to edit this curve and get rid of some of these keys you select all of the keys you hit delete go on clean curves it seems like nothing has happened but if you go under clean keyframes on the bottom left corner of the viewport you can expand that window and you can you see resample the curve you can also get some interesting animation for free so for instance let's say that we want to add some noise to this curve what we can do is click on the channel we want to operate press n on the keyboard like november and the end you see shows and hides some panels on the right hand side just like in the viewport where we press n we show and hide this sort of channel box now back to the modifiers of the curve in there we can add a modifier noise so now when i press play there is noise in there in this case this is a bit different than the bounce effect we have achieved earlier on because in this case we can actually change attributes so this is quite useful you can disable a modifier to evaluate the animation before and after and you can also reduce its influence i'm not sure you can key the influence i think it would be a great feature but i'm not sure that's doable and then you can remove them by clicking on the x modifiers can be as simple as the regular cycle we know from maya so in maya to make an animation cycle you would just go under view infinity to show infinity curve then select any key and then you go curve post infinity or pre-infinity in blender you can add a cycle modifier and in here you can perform the same operation blender comes with multiple layouts there is a layout section but there is also an animation section which comes with a default viewport in which on one side you have the camera and on the other side you have the perspective with animation tools here at the bottom you can also animate with the layout mode but you see that as i switch from layout to animation the object mode becomes pause mode so blender is self setting to animate already which is not a bad thing as you could see the initial transition is not so steep as far as character animation is concerned in fact i think the software is pretty powerful if you have found this video useful please like and subscribe and let me know i'm not just rambling on my own

Channel: Animation Pandemic

Views: 8,301

Keywords: maya to blender, character animation in blender, maya to blender transition, how to animate in blender, graph editor blender, blender dope sheet, blender tangents, bouncing ball, blender fundamentals, maya animation, learn blender, learn animation

Id: MmcrZ-qLUOE

Length: 22min 53sec (1373 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020