REACTING to 'Maya Animator Tries Blender'

last month I released a video called animating blender is easy that same day another animator released a video called Maya animator tries blender and he didn't have a good time with blender now I don't know what the algorithm gods were up to that day but they decided to show my video to the viewers of that video and so they flooded my video leaving a ton of negative comments about blender's animation capabilities even though they've never animated in blender themselves they just kept referencing that video so it made me think what if I someone who professional animates and blender checked out the Maya animators video to see what went wrong for him and how to fix it but before we get into it I just want to say that this video is all in good fun and learning I'm here to explore and share not throw shade at the Maya animator who is just trying blender so let's try and keep it respectful I I know it's a Hot Topic but let's just get into the video I'm using the Epic fig rig plugin here to rig it and and get animating the first thing that I struggled with was the modes you know you can't just start animating you have to be in a certain mode to animate but you can't even get into that mode unless you have a controller selected and then that mode becomes available yes or no and I can understand how coming from Maya where there is no modes you just click on whatever and you can move it or adjust it it's a different workflow so I can see how that was the first proc so let's see what other issues he runs into with this to see I can't even select this thing yeah he in select this dang thing again oh I'm in edit mode I got to get out of edit mode get into object mode then select this and then I can go into pose mode and now I can start animating if I wanted to adjust the environment model so let's we'll stop here let's get into it so in blender there is two modes that as an animator you need to worry about you don't need to worry about edit mode and whatever other modes there may be if you're dealing with an object when you're using a rig or an Armature really you have these three modes but all you need is pose mode and object mode now again I can see how it's difficult coming from Maya where there is no modes but all he has to do to actually switch between modes and different characters is so he can say hey I want to animate Max and if we had May character here too we would select may as well while in object mode and then you just press control tab you're in pose mode it takes .1 seconds it's just a shortcut to know and you can easily just go between object mode pose mode so let's say I have a camera and I want to go back and forth between Max which is my character rig and the camera and the camera is an object max if you want to move him he's an Armature you have to go in pose mode so you can easily just work on Max do your animations and then control tab move the camera go back to Max control Tab and continue working so it's just one extra hotkey that you have to think about when you're animating in blender versus Maya now it's not just for nothing there's a benefit to this and it's an issue I've had with Maya when because it has no modes the reason for the modes is that you can select what characters or props you want to animate with you can select multiple doesn't have to be one at a time so this way you won't accidentally animate other objects or controllers on other characters when you drag select something which is an issue I've had on Productions in Maya where I do an animation pass and I don't realize that I've also animated a controller or two on another character as well even though that character was already animated so I either got to undo all my animations or get rid of all the animations on those two controllers two or three controllers and reanimate them again so this way you won't act if there's multiple characters in the scene you won't accidentally animate anate other characters you can just animate the characters that you're animating at that moment right how often do you switch between characters when you're animating and all you have to do for that is just control T the biggest mistake people in general make is that they think blender is just a free Maya they don't take the time or put in the effort to learn blender as its own software which leads them to then get frustrated because it doesn't work like Maya it's not Maya so when you're trying to learn Blender make sure you're going into it with the idea of learning a brand new program because that's what you're doing you're learning a brand new program which is 30 years old since conception and it's come a long way all right so let's see what other issues he runs into can't click this to show you the shadow catcher thing because I have to go back to the other mode be object mode yeah so I'm in pose mode I converted all the hotkeys here to the typical Maya ones so that I could a bit more intuitively go through this because I I my head can't get wrapped around the hit G then middle Mouse drag to is at or uh the you know cancel out of this hit Escape I guess I don't you know there's just no okay so in this case he doesn't know how to move his controllers in blender so he's gone ahead and set up the gizmos here for rotate move and scale to his Maya hot Keys which is fine that's fair that's how you work in Maya but he thinks that blender doesn't have that he thinks that when you press G or S to scale or R to rotate that's the only way to work in blender and that is not the case at all yes you can use G and all those other hot keys to make some quick changes and especially if you're in a certain view you only move in that access so if I want to quickly move the this access I just press G and I can move the hand and then press R to rotate it so it's you can make quick changes very fast but how I animate in blender you have this button right here your transform Gizmo and it has your rotate it has your scale and it has your Translate Allin one or you can grab the center and move everything from any axis so in fact I like this way more than Maya because you have all of them in one and you can even select see the buttons all the way back there I can select it from the front even though it's the translate X in this point is uh behind the Gizmo you can still select it it's very handy you can even go the I don't know I'm pointing like you can see my point the white circle is also from your perspective so you can rotate it from your perspective as you change your perspective so super super handy the GSR are just there for quick changes or very precise changes because when you press GX for example you only move it on the x- axis so here I press gz and you only move it on the z- axis gy only move it on the Y AIS and so on so same with rotating same with if I want to move stuff in the graph editor I can just grab everything say gy and only move it in the Y AIS now on to the next I think here we move into the graph editor section of the video blender graph at offers a lot so you just have to know where the stuff are but if you don't then you can it can be frustrating because you don't know how it works so let's see what kind of issues he runs into somewhat work relatively to like what I'm used to working the other thing that I ran into was just managing the graph editor which is where I like to work and the main issue I had here was if I if I can select a controller that has some keys here I I'm going to turn this on because I hid this earlier for some reason when I was using a plane uh for the shadow here it still listed the rig in the graph editor along with the plane even though it didn't have the rig SL so right away I can tell that he has his character pinned you can see it right there he has his character pinned in the graph editor I he may have done this accidentally but when you pin something to the graph editor just like any software that has a pin function it stays there so he's complaining that the rig stayed in the graph editor when he pinned it to the graph editor so that's just a mistake on his part I suppose and I was trying to animate this plane and for some reason the rig yeah is still so he still has a pin so he's just confused about the graph but I don't have it selected so why would it ever be there it doesn't I don't understand that so I had to hide it um cuz I was trying to animate the plane to match the bus moving uh so that the shadow of the bus so goes on for another minute about how the character is staying in the graph and it's it's weird and it's silly but again it's all he just has to unpin it just click the button again problem solved so let's move on to the next problem attributes here so this is another frustrating thing you know in Maya when I select these not only does it highlight them in the graph editor it hides everything else so I just immediately and see exact curve that I want to see so that section is complaining about how blender doesn't hide other channels in your channel box or in the graph editor so when you drag select you only want that channel to be selected and that is very fair that's how I animate too but it's not a blender issue it's just an option you have to take off so all you have to do is just go to preferences animation and it says only show selected F curves and that is exactly the issue that he has you just have to check that on which I always have it on you just do this once save your preferences you never have to do this again so it's all about setting up your workflow to what you want because blender isn't just for animation blender is a complex program that has modeling and rigging and all these other things so you just have to set it up for animation the way you like to work now if I click on just let's say location Z and I drag select only location Z is selected everything else is hidden as it should be problem solved let's watch a little bit more of how he struggles with this and what his conclusions are that's not possible I would have to go through and untick all all of these other things just to see nine clicks to isolate one curve what bro what are you talking about man no it's just one click so you never have to do it again that's it now I hope you're enjoying these tips so far but if you want to master all of blender's animation tool we've created a comprehensive curriculum with tons of Assets in our blender Basics course which we're now calling Master blender in 7day it doesn't roll off the tongue as much but it's a lot more descriptive of what the course does so check out to anime.cat animation course which has the blender Basics included in it as a bonus now let's move on to problem three kind of frustrating was if I control middle Mouse click to zoom in vertically on this and so I have my mouse are exactly on the curve I want to just keep that curve exactly where it is in the graph editor and I want to zoom in vertically on it so that the you know this Curve will get taller in the graph editor but watch what happens when I do that I'll control middle m Mouse click and it moves the curve that I wanted to maintain that that's why I put my cursor there that's what I mean so you can always just focus on stuff on the graph editor the hotkey for this is the period button on the non pad you just press that and you focus on your selection so if I want this to be even wider then like you said I can hold control and middle Mouse and it's pretty much exactly where my cursor is it's expanding from that point so if I go downwards it gets smaller and it's it's all like within that Center so with the graph editor and like the whole scaling thing you actually have a lot more options than than Maya without add-ons I don't come at me I use both so you know with blender you actually also have the 2D cursor so you can change your pivot point to the 2D cursor and then just shift right click and you can move your 2D cursor and so what you can do is you can scale everything from your 2D cursor on the graph edor so let's say scale and it only scales outwards from there uh scale y it only scales vertically from that point that that I said the 2D cursor you can even rotate by pressing R you can rotate from that point you can rotate your points on the graph editor by having your 2D cursor at a section and pressing R so there's a lot more stuff you can do but it's not a 2d cursor video here uh so there's a lot of stuff you can do with blender if you know how especially with the graph editor so let's let's go into the next issue that he runs into help me understand that what in the heck is going on there because it's so hard to go between different curves of different values um which is another thing in Maya like I can just go one two three to go absolute normalized or stacked curves and I'm not entirely sure I'm sure they have this somewhere they have normalize here but that doesn't seem to do okay so so here he runs into an issue where he wants all his curves within the same range so you don't have an issue where your x value is at like 10 but then your y value is at like 200 so you have to like scroll all the way down to get to the 200 value and he he almost had it he almost had it realized that blender does have normalized which is the button for that it's called the same thing in Maya and he had a deactivated but then he activated it but he had every other channel hidden so the only thing he was normalizing was that one channel so all he had to do was unhide everything and just check that only selected F curse button so he can focus on whatever Channel he wants to work on and once he pressed normalized he just had to select everything and focus on it if he wanted to focus on everything so here I have normalized on and you can see the lowest the values go in the graph editor is ne1 and the highest the values go is one so all of your curves are with a negative 1 to one and you won't you will never have to scroll all the way down and scroll all the way up to find a curve it's all within that range so let's move on to the next issue the same thing I don't I don't really know what this is about that those are kind of the main barriers I have and then inserting a key is similar to Mya where I can go in here instead of I I really don't like the hit I and then I have to choose the stuff who would who would like this it's just so many button clicks to get to a key um I have auto key turned on which is great right so his problem is that every time he presses I these sets of options show up and he has to select which option of keying he wants to do well again it's it's a nonissue what key he wants to set so you can actually come down here to your king and change it to whichever one your heart desires so the one I usually go with is location rotation scale and custom properties so this sets keys on anything an animator would want key in an Armature so in a ray but you have the option to actually choose anything so you can set visual ual location so it will set a key on the world location of a controller so if you want to match two characters or the position of two controllers you can copy one paste it into another controller and it will snap to exactly where that other controller is in space and of course you have it butload of other options too but all he has to do is just set one of them in the keying section and then he can go on and just press I and the option will never pop up again because you've already set it and for me this gives me a lot more control over my animation than when I'm animating in Maya let me see if I can recreate that so if I move this it should set a key uh this already has keys on it maybe isn't a good example and so yeah this is a different kind of so this is the transforms not for the thing I have selected I have to which is weird because as soon as you select something in you get to see exactly the thing you have selected the channel box yes cuz why wouldn't you want to see the thing you have selected that's why you're selecting it because you want change it but for some reason in blender you kind of have again it's this management thing where I have to I think I guess go to the Armature this is where it you don't okay so um the thing he's looking for is the channel box which is right here so whatever controller you select you have the location rotation scale and the custom properties that that has so here we have parent space so you can change the parent space of the head for example all this is right here he had the channel box is there but he has it hidden so all he has to do is press n and the channel box will appear but he has it hidden um may have been by accident but then he's going to Armature and changing the arm the Armature controllers and is doing this weird uh like eating your food in Stu like this he's eating his food like this because he doesn't know that he just has to press n to bring up his channel box you can hide the channel box in Maya too he just you have to know the hotkey to bring it back turn it on and turn it off right n and that's it rest of this video shifts away from animation so if you want to watch the full thing I'll have the link in the description but if you want to learn more about animation and blender then you can check out the infamous video we've been talking about how animating and blender is easy

Channel: BrianKouhi

Views: 15,698

Keywords: animator reacts, animating in blender, how to animate in blender, maya animator trying blender, how to animate in blender for beginners

Id: Fu1dJEG-Gak

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024