5 Tips in Maya You NEED to Know!!!

what's up everyone welcome back to how to become an animator I'm surveyed and this week I've been doing a lot of animation for a client and I've been trying to work really efficiently so I've been thinking a lot about simple things in Maya I can totally change the way you work because today I want to show you five essential things you need to know in Maya that's just gonna make your life so much easier most of the things I'm about to share with you are things that I wish I knew as a student or I discovered as a student and wished I had discovered it earlier on one less thing to share before we jump in if you guys are looking for more educational resources I have a patreon page and I'll put that right here I do classes and live Q&A s and demos and all kinds of cool stuff there and you can download the project files for any video that has a file associated with it such as any Maya tutorials that I do or if you're not as interested in educational resources and you're more looking for visual effects and motion graphics just watching someone work you can follow me on Twitch here and that's pretty much what I do that I just livestream anytime I work on After Effects for cinema 4d and that kind of stuff the final thing I want to share because I got a lot of comments about this all the rig's you're about to see in this video are all rigs from animation mentors you can head down there to check out their website and with that let's jump into it the number one is a very small change you can make in the preferences of Maya but it makes a huge difference in your relationship with the software if you've ever opened Maya and just started working animating modeling whatever it is you're doing just with the default settings you've probably noticed if you start undoing at a certain point you see this no more changes to undo for some dumb reason Maya has a default limit of 50 undos in the stack before you can't undo anything more so anything past 50 controls ease or commands ease that's it unless you change this setting and it's super easy to do so you should do it immediately and then Maya will remember for next time so here's how you do it if we go into our Maya session and look on the very bottom right corner of the screen you'll see this icon I call this the man running from the gear of death but it is your animation Preferences window so if you click on that you'll see this window pop up which has a bunch of really great settings that you should definitely dig through and play around with look on the left side of the screen if you click on undo you can choose between an infinite number and a finite number of undo is allowed for your Maya session now I don't know why anyone would ever want a finite number especially a 50 so let's just go ahead and click infinite and the next time you open this version of Maya this setting should be saved now number two is going to help a ton of people I don't know what your screen looks like when you work but when I am working I usually have two different sides of my screen open now what you've probably experienced in the past at some point is you've got a screen open that is your camera view that you're working from and you try to remember not to mess with that camera because if you move it then you've just changed your camera view and now like things are broken so it's so different that kind of stuff you only want to leave your your shot cam the camera that you intend to play blast or render from you want to leave that alone once you've got it in the spot that you have it in know one thing you can do if you're in mine 2017 or later you can actually just hit this little camera lock icon and that'll just lock the transformation attributes of that camera your translates and your rotates they won't allow you to move but sometimes you might need a free camera and so locking the camera may not be the right option for you and if that's the case that's where camera bookmarks are gonna come into play we're looking in the top left corner of this panel and you'll see this little bookmark icon if you click on that what it's going to do over here on the right you can see it added an input to this camera basically just saved the current location of this camera now what's great is that at any point you can right-click on the bookmark icon and you'll see that you have whatever things you've saved now in this little menu if you click on one it will jump to the bookmark that you have selected number three is for those of you who are trying to maximize the usefulness of the amount of space you have on your screen at one time if like me you like to work with multiple windows open or with panels torn off or anything like that you've probably run into the situation where maybe you have a window where you're working like I do here on the right and over on the left I have my camera view but anytime you scale the window in or out it's not showing you your entire shot it's kind of just squishing stuff and like self adjusting or maybe you have a different setting where you do see your entire camera view and it is scaling appropriately but you have this weird border around the edge and there's nothing wrong with the fact that you can see the actual square the problem is that you have all this blank space around it so what you're gonna want to do is if you select your camera this is the most easily done by clicking the camera icon on the top left corner of whatever panel you're currently trying to work with if you come over to the right side with the attribute editor open so I have control a to switch that over the first drop-down menu we want to open here is the film back menu in here you'll see a setting called fit resolution gate and it's either gonna be set to fill horizontal or overscan depending on your settings I'm not sure which is the default if you want to fill the entire screen and have it see the entire character and just you know not really worried about the camera view that's fill but if you want to have control over the box than the border around it you want to change this mode to overscan next close the phone back tab and head down to the display options tab inside the V attribute editor there are a couple different settings for opacity you can change the color if you want to make it really apparent that the stuff outside that box is not going to render but what we care about most is down here at the bottom where it says overscan now if you play with this number you're going to see that a value of one is to fill the window entirely and sometimes a little bit too much if you change this number to a little bit over one you'll effectively get rid of that border and you will now be able to scale your screen without having all that blank space surrounding the window or if you're doing a play blast and you don't want to have stuff rendered around the little box it creates this will limit that space number four is extremely straightforward and most people probably know about this setting but I need to make sure my recommendation is to use auto key Auto keys just the best and I didn't use it as a student because I wasn't used to like pressing new buttons and changing settings Auto key has no side effects let me give you a great example of how I've always suffered not using Auto key yeah I've got this awesome rig this awesome character cool I'm gonna like do this great pose I'm here he's gonna be like blasting like an Iron Man repulsor sweet this is looking great action pose awesome I think I'm good with this pose I'm just gonna scrub back to frame one I'm gonna play it back wait where's my animation I just changed I just spent like 10 minutes on this pose and just like that you realize you forgot to set keys on all those controls this happens all the time it's a very common thing the software at DreamWorks that people animate on it's not Maya it's called primo and it's a proprietary tool that DreamWorks developed their software is only Auto key if you can't turn AutoKey off it only exists because it's faster you're not having to set Keys manually and they're just happening on its own will save you time and it also saves you this headache so to change that we just jump back to Maya and then the bottom right corner right next to the man running from the gear of death we have this little loopy icon and this is Auto key if you turn this on keep it highlighted it should save when you close Maya and it should always stay on it will now keep track of your changes as you make them the only rule about Auto key is that for something to automatically set a key on when you make a change you must first already have a key on something so when you open a rig the first thing you should do is grab all the controls everything you're gonna use everything you might even possibly use you can always do it later but just get it all out of the way now go to the first frame or the last frame or some frame outside of your even work time doesn't matter grab everything and hit s set a key on everything that way when you go to a new frame and you make a change a key already exists and it now sees ah there was a change mark that and set a key on that thing and finally number five before I tell you if you're enjoying this video and you want to see more stuff like this don't forget to subscribe down below and if you don't wanna miss an upload hit that little notification bell so YouTube actually tells you you want to upload a video so yeah thanks anyways number five is value manipulation and basically what I want to talk about here is there are tons of different ways to make changes to the controls in your maya session there are lots of different ways to save you time for example so you've got this character super awesome and you want to move like the main core hip controller that moves the majority of the body the upper body and you just move it visually that's the most obvious way to change things and I forgot to record this in the video but if you push plus or minus on your keyboard it'll change the size of the manipulator that that rotation orbit ball for example or the translation arrows or whatever if you push Plus it gets bigger - gets smaller it doesn't just change the size it also changes the sensitivity of that visual manipulation you can also do it numerically but you can literally come over here to the controls and you can click on these values and you can type a new number and you can multi select a whole bunch of them and you can type one number and it will apply it to all of them that works - and it's a good way to zero out your controls if you're grabbing a bunch of stuff and trying to just go back to default but you can actually click on the name of the control but if you bring the mouse into the regular area with the character into the actual viewer middle mouse click and drag with that stuff selected over on the right and it will adjust those controls up and down what's also good to know is if you hold control you'll get a finer more sensitive approach if you hold shift it's going to accelerate this and go way more intensely if you're a mix between a numbers person and a visual person and you want to see a representation in a different way you're probably familiar with the graph editor and if you're not we definitely need to go get a video on that so if you need a graph editor video let me know down below in the comments if the graph editor is something you struggle with and what it is that you need help with so I can make the right video but if you open the animation editor graph editor you're going to see a visual representation so you can grab keyframes and you can shift them up and down to change their values left and right to change their timing and some people just prefer to work entirely redditor but anyway the point here is that there are lots of different ways to grab and manipulate your characters controls and it's good to know different methods so that you can figure out what's fastest for you there may be a better way to do it so that is it for my tips those are my five essential things that I think you need to know in Maya with a couple bonus is thrown in there they're just gonna make your life easier because if you're fighting undos and you're fighting camera placements all that kind of stuff you're just wasting time and getting frustrated so hopefully these things are helpful let me know down below what was the best for you and if there's anything else that you struggle with or if there's any tips that you have things you've learned that would help other people down in the comments and network flows as well again the links for everything are down in the description thinking you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 78,201

Keywords: 5 maya tips, maya animation tips, animator advice, animation tutorial, animation mentor, maya for beginners, animation for students, animation tips and tricks, animation tips maya, maya camera animation, maya infinite undo, maya unlimited undo, maya best rigs, best animation rigs, animation rigs, rigs for animators, animation mentor rigs, things i wish i knew, animation q&a, artist tutorial, animation school, maya, 3d animation, maya 3d, maya 2018, become an animator, 3d

Id: L9B3GyLsWBE

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018