400% FASTER Animation with Studio Library

in animation pose library is one of the most common and one of the most useful tools that you can have in Your Arsenal almost every Studio has it in one way or another Studios like DreamWorks or Pixar that have proprietary tools have built their own custom Library plugins that work in their software but every other Studio that uses Maya or even blender is going to be using one of two things if you're in Maya you're probably using the free Studio Library plugin which we're going to talk about today and if you're in blender I think it's built in now to blender's Features you just have a pose library but either way these are some of the most useful tools because you can save individual poses for your character whether it be the entire body departures of the face hands mouth eyes whatever you want and you can save entire clips of animation and on top of being able to just apply those poses later you can also blend between them which is where things get really interesting and it's important to keep in mind that while this can save you so much time and make your shots go by so much faster because imagine not having to pick every single finger control whenever you want to make a change to the hands it's also not where you stop because while it can give you a great springboard to start with your posing you still want to tweak and make changes from there but it lets you get past the tedious part and get into the fun bits so today I want to show you how Studio Library works the free plugin that we're going to install in Maya and I'm going to show you how to use it but whether you're using Studio library or blenders pose library or whatever tool you may be using these tips and best practices are going to apply regardless because the first time I ever used something like this was it DreamWorks that was the first time I ever saw a studio Library used at a studio and man it completely changed the way I animate I'm sir Wade and if you like videos like this make sure you're subscribed for more animation content for now let's jump into one of the best tools in an animators Arsenal I'll link this page down below but this is where you download Studio Library you can ignore where it doesn't list new versions of Maya it does work for new versions so that's fine so download it extract the zip and drag this installation now just into your Maya viewport that will give you this button here which we can click and pull up the studio library now when you open yours for the first time it's probably not going to have nearly as much as mine because I've been using it and there's a bunch of stuff already in there but to give you the quick tour top left corner is where you add new stuff you can create folders poses animations we'll get to all of that you can search and fill filter for angry and you can see the stuff and it's also context specific so if I'm in a folder of Apollo's face I'll get the angry stuff there or if I'm outside that folder it'll search for everything that it can see other quick UI stuff before we get to the good stuff you can filter the results you can change the size of these depending on your screen space or you can dial it down to detail view if you want change the Border spacing things like that there's grouping there's sorting there's hiding the sidebars once you have your settings dialed in and you just want to apply poses and say you go buy the Apollo rig which is this guy right here and download his pose library because they actually he comes with one he and Artemis both come with a pose library and you want this to refresh you hit this button and it'll reload the folders that it has access to a couple other settings and we're good to go I'm going to go ahead and dock this so I'll get into all the intricacies of how to apply the data how to set the namespace how to do the blending how to save animation Clips like I'll get into all that but real quick just like the base functionality if you want to save a pose or if you want to save an animation into the pose Library so you have something to play with all you have to do is select a certain group of controls that you want to say save as the pose and then add that to the library you can grab the entire character every single control on there but then if you double click it it's going to change your entire pose that may not be what you want so keep in mind that not every pose needs to include every control so if I go like this and grab all these green controls minus the head control I don't want that now I have all of his brow controls and actually I should probably add these ones as well that's all the brow controls two things you're going to want to do right off the bat is if you make a pose you could hit the plus button you can say save pose and now you're ready to click here it'll take a little snapshot of your character which you know you might want to reposition your camera click it again and you know get a good view of whatever the poses you're saving give it a name hit save now at any point if you go and try to double click you might get some errors you might not but once your settings are all set properly you can double click and it'll work and we'll get into all that in a second the other thing you want to do is whatever little selection set you just used to set those those brow Keys you can either say also add a selection set for the character and you could do the same thing just call it browse and hit save it looks like it's the same thing but you've set a pose and a set the difference here is that if you are applying stuff you can now click this little selection set button and say browse it will select just the browse and now you can apply any pose to just specifically the browse it gives you just a quick way to grab all those controls you don't need to do that if you have anabot though because you can just make a little browse button here and that will accomplish the same goal because ultimately it wants to apply the whole pose unless you have specific controls engaged then it will just do what you have selected and this is the base idea of creating and activating poses whether it's you know setting poses for everything or specific stuff and then applying those poses for everything or specific stuff so those are the very Basics now let's jump into the good stuff so when you want to apply a post to a character you click on something you can see some information you've got lots of settings the one that's most important one starting out is this namespace area you don't have to understand this super well but what's going to happen is most likely you're going to double click it and it's going to give you an error this is super easy to fix most people get stuck and go why is it working in this particular case my error is that the namespace Apollo does not exist in the scene please choose a different one well here's the thing there are three options from file from selection and use custom and this is really easy if you use from selection if I select anything on this character it's going to tell me what the namespace is for this asset you can see it's Apollo tracksuit ready Apollo which if I open my outliner why it is that whole name we don't need to dive into but basically I took that character put the tracksuit on him and then saved that as a you know save as new version of the rig and I now reference that in when I'm going to animate but that's why from file didn't work by default because I'm not using the default rig I'm using a version that I created so from file is what it thinks it wants to use which in my case won't work it'll tell me it doesn't exist I could use from selection I could click it and it'll tell me what it is although you have to be careful because if I have more characters in the scene and I click a different character it'll change it to that character and then there's use custom which is the drop down where you can choose a specific character to be applying poses to it one time but once you have that set properly all you have to do is double click the pose and it will throw it on the character what's cool is you can technically apply any poses to any character as long as the rigs are compatible with each other for example if I go to Animation Mentor and pick Aya for example I want to throw them out shape on it's not going to let me because the io rig The Animation Mentor right here on the left is not the same as the Apollo and Artemis rigs so the Animation Mentor characters in some cases may work with each other just like Apollo and Artemis can work with each other because they were designed the same they have the same hierarchies and they are compatible in that way but that's probably not going to be the case for just any rigs you download just assume that each character is going to have their own unique set of things that probably won't transfer unless you get lucky like this something interesting is that when I was at DreamWorks you could take poses from Hiccup and put them on toothless you could take Dragon poses and put them on the humans you could put any pose on any character because they were all rigged using the same kind of hierarchy and so they were all cross-compatible they didn't always look good and I wish I had photos to show you but that's one of the things that's so powerful about you know a consistent structure of Pipeline and you know the way you structure your data is that you can reuse a lot of your tools and data across movies or projects or shots in your case so you don't have to redo all your work every single time now what's even cooler is I don't have to use the whole thing I can just grab the bottom half of his face and double click and apply those controls just to that stuff that I selected this down here where it says from selection under namespace that has nothing to do with like which controls it's applying to it's just when it's when it's going to apply a pose to a character namespace says which character do we apply it to so if I had two copies of Apollo in the scene and I said from selection and I clicked on one applied a pose we go to him click the different characters applied the same pose it would go to that one so it would just kind of jump back and forth based on selection so if you have multiple characters in the scene use the drop down and pick a specific one that way it's not sending poses to the wrong characters but I'll show you something even cooler if I take a glare face and say you know what I wanna I wanna make him more Furious I can click Furious and rather than just double clicking and overwriting it like this I'm going to take the little slider down here and I'm just going to blend in a little bit of that Fury and I can say all right maybe I don't want full Fury I want 75 but now you know what maybe I want him to start having some fear so I'm going to start blending in some Terror and now he starts to get a complex emotion that's mixing the two maybe he's so afraid and concerned it's actually kind of disgusting what he's looking at and it's like oh God what oh no it's evolved ah and what's cool is you can actually you can take it Beyond even further Beyond I can go to 130 and I'm starting to kind of break his rig a little bit but you can push it even further you can also subtract this from the pose and kind of undo it which here you have to be careful because it's very easy to break stuff I'm getting pretty closer to breaking his eyes but I don't know if I take fear and gasp and then pull that away and then I take this smile and I pull that away yeah you know you can you can go a little too far with it but then you can just double click and reapply it and say haha back to normal until you know what things things got a little a little sad when using Studio Library you don't want to just use Studio Library this will give you an amazing starting point you still want to come in here and tweak the stuff like you are still the animator not the computer and using someone else's poses can be super helpful or even your own but you probably still want to go in and tweak it so you can get what you want right whether it's just the jaw like I just did or you know really adding a lot to the face but this is how you can use it you can use it to sort of start you off on the right foot and move forward much quicker this is going to come in especially handy with things like hands you'll notice that if I click on hand and I double click it what's going to happen is we get the close we get the climb we get the Fist and that is so much time saved from grabbing each individual finger control and you know moving them and adjusting like that is necessary from time to time but if you already have all the poses saved you can move between them so much faster now if we say all right this is the fist this is relaxed fist but I don't want it quite so tight I can take the Fist and say you know what dial some fist back in here and get something more like that again I might still have to tweak this which is totally fine like that's just part of the job right but now I've got a more relaxed fist also because I only had this hand selected that's why it only did the one hand in this character's case in particular if I click on um this clench pose it'll actually do it to both of them now there's a like a hidden tip right here that I want to show you because this is super useful for when you make your own poses when you click one of these poses I can see that there are 32 objects contained within there are 32 controls and their transformation data saved in each of these hand poses now if I click on all the hand controls just drag select here and take everything in the hand not including the rest I don't need the rest here no controls like that how many controls is this well atom bot down here tells me it's 16. there are 16 hand controls on this rig for each hand 32 means that that is 16 on this side 16 on this side these poses are both saved in the one pose which is why it's so easy for me to just grab one hand and apply a pose in the same way that the face has all of the face data but if I just grab the mouth it'll just apply the mouth same thing it's got data in the pose for both hands so I can have it go to both or I can just say you know what just the ones I select now here's another way to do it here's the Asbury rig and these are poses that I made and I made these before I fully knew how this plugin worked so what I did is I made left hand poses and right hand poses and that's totally valid I can take the left hand and I can apply it to the left hand and I can apply the right hand and do that but that's more work than is necessary what you should be able to do is just take your left hand and say you know what actually I want to put that on the other hand what you're supposed to do is just click a pose click mirror and then it'll throw it on the other side so if it's a left hand pose it'll send it to the right however in my case that's not going to work because I didn't set up a mirror table which is where you you grab all the controls of the character you make a mirror table and then you tell Studio Library the left controls have left in their name and the right controls have right in their name and then it knows oh yeah okay so I'll just mirror left to right and right to left personally I'm a fan of how the Apollo rig is set up having both hands all just in the one pose and then you just grab the controls you want to apply it to I also like it because you can just grab specific fingers and just blend in certain parts of a pose to make things faster one last thing I want to cover here is that if you have a pose and you click the additive button it won't just overwrite it because by default if I double click this and double click this it'll just you know jump between the two overwrite the data but if you switch the additive button if you double click it again it will reapply it on top it'll add it on top of the already existing pose that's there which in this case gives a Spider-Man so those can be some really useful ways to add and blend the stuff in there now there's one last thing in this little panel that I didn't really talk about which is this little button next to apply if you click this and you want to apply it but not the whole thing the other way if you don't want to grab specific controls is you can click this for selection sets and you can apply it to specific sets of the character that you've already pre-made what I mean by that is if you just grab all of the brow controls for a character you can select them all create a selection set and then that will be saved as a specific way to just apply a pose to the Brows you do the same thing for the eyes you you know lower face upper face hands fingers whatever and all of those choices will be saved in the studio Library so you don't have to redo that every single time you start a new shot with this character which can be really helpful so you can see if I now go to the little selection set and say face browse it will grab those specific controls and then I can apply it just to those parts it's kind of the same thing as if you did it manually but it saves you the time of having to manually select them again so that's a quick way to do it you can also do what I do by using the atom bot selection set here because then you have little floating buttons that you can say browse go so it's the same thing what's also cool is you can save not just poses but animation full animation into the studio Library so if I come over to azri over here and I pick her a namespace so that that's where the animation goes I can just double click and apply this walk cycle that I did at some point for a demo so if I undo that I can show you that if you click the animation you have a few different options you can connect it to other animation you can set it to the current like where do you want to paste it in into like the frames you can have it replace your animation insert it in the middle of stuff merge it with existing data that you might have things like that so you have some options here and you can also do the same thing by just grabbing a specific part of the character and applying it only to that one thing so you can do a lot with this and if you want to get really fancy with it you could take that throw that on an animation layer specifically and now you have a slider for how strong that data from the pose library was so now if you scrub through it it's it's weaker it's a weaker walk no I didn't set this up properly so I can't just play it normally I have to do all the looping stuff but you can see that it's it's subdued it's only using a percent image of the actual animation so you can get pretty creative with this but here's the thing when you're going to use Studio Library the best thing you can do is really commit to using it like clear some time spend a day spend a couple of hours and sit down and make yourself a pose Library if you are just starting out with a character this can be a great way to get accustomed to the controls and see what you like to use what controls in the body help you to achieve the poses that you're going to want to use in the future and you can always go back and update these poses later if you find like huh I don't like the way I made the poses you'll learn a lot from it but create yourself a folder for the body for the face for the hands for mouth poses you can do stuff for Expressions you can do stuff for lip sync the different phones you might want to use but I swear one of the most useful things is going to be the hand poses give yourself a bunch of options for hand poses that way you don't have to spend so much time clicking every single finger control anytime you need to make a change or set the pose a few other tips save your rigs default pose as opposed in your library so you can always set the rig back to its t-pose or its a pose back to its default position and then also create yourself what's called pose default that's something use the DreamWorks which was you would set up your preferences your follow aligns your you know where you like the arms to be IKS and FKS things like that set up the rig how you like to work and then save it as a pose so when you load in this character in the future to use it you just apply your pose and you're ready to start animating you don't have to set up okay follow the lines okay arms down set it to ik like you don't have to do all that I also recommend when you're doing body poses don't include this big ring at the bottom the big Master Control ring because for example if you're laying out the shot and you're moving the character all the way over here and see that's where I want the character to start in the scene and I apply a pose bam by applying a pose it didn't like reset this back to default because when I made this pose I didn't have this selected if I had had that selected like the entire character including that ring well then it would have snapped her back to wherever she was when I made the pose right so you don't always want to include everything in your poses now super quickly how to actually make a pose if you make any changes to a control and we just say all right I'm gonna turn her head and I'll lift a shoulder that is my beautiful pose I love it so much I want it I'm gonna grab her whole character I'm going to unselect the bottom ring for the reason I just told you in this case I probably don't need the entire body all keyed I could probably just do it as a head pose or something but let's just show you how it works I can say plus pose I'm going to add a pose now you want to persist in the camera wherever I can click this it'll make a thumbnail and I could zoom in closer and just try to get a better thumbnail I recommend setting up a camera to actually just do this properly but if it is a full body pose I'll Zoom it out so I can see that is what I'm going to get we'll call this uh head tilt because that's what we love like a comment hit save so now if I double click rig default hose default hit tilt bam I can click this and I could blend it and there we go and I can also you can see you can overshoot it again and you can subtract it but that is how you create a pose and it's the same thing for animation you grab whatever controls are involved you don't have to grab everything just the stuff you're actually animating and you click plus animation and when you click this button what it's going to do is it's actually going to run through and like create a play blast that will then play let's switch maybe I should show you a little bit better if I take this walk cycle that's kind of broken because I've been messing with the shot if I grab all the stuff plus animation and I click this button what it's going to do is it's going to create a play blast that now you can see it's it's trying to show me what's going to happen you can also change you know it right now for me to did a play blast of every five frames because this isn't five I could do every 12 frames I could do every one one frame if I click it again it will resample that and give me a better preview you name it you tell the frame range that you're working with which in my case it's defaulting to the parts I actually have animation data on you hit save it's pretty easy it's pretty straightforward it's actually pretty difficult to mess it up and if you ever want to fix it you can just try it again and delete the old one the last thing I want to share about why you should be using this is not just about the ease of use for animation or saving great poses so that you can use them again later animations things like that this is an amazing recovery tool it happened from time to time where your files might get corrupted or something goes wrong with your save or your Maya session and you're not sure if the data is actually exporting properly or maybe you just want to export the data to like get it into another file like plenty of valid reasons grab all your animation data save it as an animation within the pose library now you have something that's not tied to Maya at all that you know you can have that file be corrupted messed up deleted doesn't matter your studio Library files still contain the animation data for that rig and you can go reapply it in another shot it has saved my life so many times it's one of the easiest ways to just get your animation data out of Maya quickly and safely to then be salvaged later and to that end you can also save iterations so if you like a version of your animation and you want to try something new but you're afraid to break it and you don't want to just do like a full Maya full save as the whole file just save the animation data as okay work in progress then do whatever you want to do and if you're like oh I hate it just reapply the original data and you're back to where you were same as buffer Curves in the graph editor there's a lot of different ways to do this kind of stuff but here's another tool in your tool belt but I hope you're convinced and I hope this helped Studio library is a great tool it has highly recommend it it's free so it's really easy to you know try it out and see if you like it and the more you use it the more often you add to it the more powerful a resource is going to be later on when you're first starting out it's going to seem hard to get into it because you have to sit down spend the time and actually make some poses but I promise you in the long run you will thank yourself it will be so worth it and if you and friends are working on different poses together you can all share these poses these files live on your computer you can export them save them share them with other people and build this Resource as a group so with that hope you enjoyed like this video If you enjoyed it check out my Maya for animators Workshop if you want more stuff like this subscribe if you haven't already I think that's all my call outs I'm sir Wade and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 40,495

Keywords: maya animation, blender animation, studio library, studio library tutorial, pose library, pose library tutorial, how to build animation library, animation library, animation poses, save animation, share animation poses, animation studio tips, animation workflows, animation workflow tips, character animation tutorials, animation plugins, animation addons, studio library tool, save poses maya, studio library maya tutorial, mirror animation, maya library, save poses, reuse, 3d

Id: isIuRfM0u1o

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023