First Impressions Blender vs Maya - Animation Workflows!

are you ready to talk about the differences between Maya's animation tools and blenders animations tools because I am I've been using Maya for over eight years and I used to teach software at DreamWorks so I'm also gonna be comparing some things to DreamWorks Animation software my experience in Maya is way more vast than my very new beginnings in blender and I've spent a lot of time on my live streams on Twitch diving into the two programs trying to learn the differences try to understand workflows and I think I've got some interesting findings now I'm not trying to stand here and tell you which one's better and why this one's worse and nothing like that the reason I want to compare the two because a for any of you who are looking at the other tool wondering what it's got for you it's important to know the differences and also I'll be comparing some stuff to the dreamwork software because I think there's some stuff to learn for reason number two but there's gonna be making a whole bunch of changes to their animation tools and two-point-nine and beyond from what I hear and there's a few things I really really hope they add some things I really like they do and some things that I still think Maya has been beat on so today we're gonna dive into that we're gonna start with rig stuff the UI interface we're gonna get into animation basics graph editor some stuff about hotkeys and some wish list items that neither Maya nor blender has stuff that DreamWorks of software does I've never seen outside the studio and man a blender can add that in their software but what's up in case you new here I'm sure Wade and they do a ton of animation stuff here on the channel from rig reviews interviews a whole bunch of animation tips tricks advice all kinds of cool stuff so if you haven't taken a look around hit that subscribe button bring the notification bell so you don't miss new uploads and browser on the channel if you're newer and you have more slot on my videos look back and see what interesting stuff there is because I bet you there's something you'll like or if you want to hang out live on Twitch I'm actually doing a 24 hour animation live stream later this week if you're watching this when I upload it and I'll also be releasing this shirt which I designed it's the spine shirt so if you like that link below for that or twitch for my patreon if you want to support the channel where you can support what I'm doing get some animation tutoring all the good stuff for now though let's talk about the differences between Maya's animation and blenders animation starting with Maya if we want to bring in a character we have the choice to import or to reference you want to reference so if I just go ahead and grab a rig it's as simple as loading the character and there it is there's our mesh there's our character rig and it's ready to go I can just start animating where you had import and reference you know how append and link so did the same thing I'm gonna link a trig now this one's a little bit different I'm gonna link the blend file but then you have to know kind of where to go it's gonna collection got the multiple once that comes in we have this ball but it's not yet ready to animate what I need to do is create a proxy I'm not entirely sure what that means but I have to basically pull the rig out so I can actually mess with it love the f3 menu and blender by the way but if I make a proxy and then I select the ball also I can't just drag select over this I actually have to click on it slight difference in color there turn on the display filter and make sure I can't grab the the geometry I only want to grab the rig and then I have to go to pose mode now I'm allowed to animate the ball that's a whole lot of setup for just getting a character in I would absolutely love if blender introduces a new mode now again I'm very new to blender so there may be things in this video that you can do or that they're planning on doing and I'm just not aware of it and if that's true just let me know in the comments but I'm trying my best here and one thing I'd love to see is an animation mode where maybe you're in that mode and you bring in a character rig you don't have to deal with all that it just kind of does all that for you also I'd love to be able to make these lines thicker than just a little thin for me kind of hard to see to know where they are also something different about blender to Maya blender will take like this green object and make it a brighter green or this dark red make it a lighter red I really like in Maya how it has a selection color makes it a very bright vibrant either green which you can change and customize or just a bright white and maybe you can change that by its fault the blender but I find that much easier to see what it is I'm looking at then just making the color a little bit brighter just a personal preference now when I'm working in Maya I usually like to have two windows side-by-side I have one that has my actual render view camera view with no display curves no none of this stuff on the right everything's there that way I know what I'm working with and I can just kind of preview on the left and work on the right now to set all that up I have to go to this show menu and basically tell one window to have all these things and the other menu not to and I have to pick and choose and you can save some of that and blender this setup of the workflow process is handled really nicely cuz you have all these different layouts in the same way with Maya you can also save different panel layouts over here on the Left blender has them along the top and then you have the overlay editor something I'd love I mentioned this in my other video I would love to be able to specify and say want to have the geometry wireframe at a certain percentage and this and this and this this and choose a whole bunch of things for my overlays and then set that up as a profile that I could activate very quickly and switch between profiles that way if I need to make a view somewhere on my screen that's a working view or a camera view without all the stuff I can very easily just hit a button to do that that'd be sweet Maya doesn't really have a fast way to do that either whenever you make a new camera view you have to redo all that stuff as well so just saying one thing I like about blender a lot though is if I want to grab drag slug for example the controls on the rig I accidentally grab the plane it's very easy if I have the toggle selection thing active and I can just say no you're not allowed to have that you're not allowed to have that I can just turn things off right here in my outliner so now I don't accidentally grab what I don't want in Maya I can do the same thing but I do it through my display layers I would create a layer from selected and tell it to be referenced which for me is faster just because I'm used to it but it doesn't make nearly as much sense doing it that way and it's also a little iffy when you start to get a lot of different things and you wanna have things in multiple layers it starts to get weird and there's stuff about hierarchies I actually don't love the way of doing it there I think blender actually has a little bit of an advantage when it comes to choosing what's visible not visible selectable and not things like that now this is the last kind of UI interface thing before we get into the animation stuff but something that just drives me crazy about blender that I really like about Maya and you could change it you can make it work but blender is hot keys are all over the keyboard and yes I know you can change things to be industry-standard mode and you can go to Maya sakis but then you lose all the cool blender key maps that you're used to that blender is known for that you have all these extra functions they don't get remapped anywhere because Maya doesn't have that many hotkeys set up by default and then it's hard to follow tutorials and stuff if you're learning so I I've been told not to do that so I'm not doing that for example if I want to select this ball and zoom in on it I have to go all the way to my number pad and hit that period button to focus on selected it's not just in the little region where my hand is normally at whereas a Maya I just have key right there next to all my other stuff they're all kind of right in the same little cluster blender I have to kind of look and go across the keyboard which doesn't make sense for an efficiency thing obviously you can change that but I'm going to talk a little bit more about pot keys later on now starting to get it into the animation stuff here's a really interesting difference that any professional animators out there are really going to want to know there's a huge difference between the way Maya blender and DreamWorks as animation software for example use auto key Auto key for anyone who's not familiar is the idea that if you have an object in one spot and then you go to another frame and you move it to another spot you the software realizes that that change that you made is probably significant and it just records it as a new keyframe versus you having to remember to hit a button basically it saves a lot of time if you are jumping through frames doing all these poses and me at play nothing happens because you didn't remember to set a key Auto key solves that problem and the dreamwork software pre no actually you cannot turn AutoKey off we'll get to that in a second but there's an interesting way that auto key works it's important to know and it's different in these tools in Maya you can turn it on via this little button in the bottom right corner here but here's the deal if I have an object sitting in one spot and I don't have a key on it at all I go to another frame and I changed the position and then they have play nothing happens because I never set one initial key on the object so Maya was never looking for a change you have to set one key before you do anything to let Maya know so that initial key is what enables Auto key for that object which is why when you start a scene in Maya you pretty much always just grab everything and the entire rig and set one big massive key this is actually the exact same way that primo works at DreamWorks however when you open a shot it already has that one main key on every control and the entire scene every object that can be keyed is key and you cannot delete that key period so it has to know that starting point so that if you go to a new frame and make a change and has something to compare itself to however things are different in blender if I have an object in a spot and I turn AutoKey on but I don't set a key on the object there is no initial key when I go to a new frame and I move that object a key is created even though I didn't have that initial kind of comparison keyframe but it doesn't remember the first place the first spot that what that it was at at the very beginning I had never set a key it didn't have one by default and so if I scrub through I only have the second and third key frames it's still probably smarter to set that first key if you need it but that behavior is a little bit different just in case I just want to throw that out there that is the difference in the way it behaves now here is an absolutely day-and-night huge difference between Maya between blender and it's something that I really really am struggling with I don't know if I'm gonna ever be able to animate and blender without this kind of matching and I'm not trying to say blender duo Maya does but I would like the option for this to happen if there is like an animation drop-down mode oh here's the deal the hotkeys if I grab a control I hit the G key it allows me to just move the object if I hit R for rotation I can just start spinning it by the s4 scale I can see the benefit of that that seems actually really cool it's mostly for modeling and different things that is not really useful in my case in my opinion from my workflow in my experience I'm never going to use that for animation and here's why so if I want to move this ball straight up and down I'm not gonna use G and I know people gonna say hey but you can use like G Z and then move it up now I'm sure you know that's cool that's not bad actually like the idea of that but for animation specifically very often I'm looking really closely at my screen and I'm trying to keep in mind exactly where something is and I want to be able to grab it and then move it up a few pixels and maybe rotate it just so and be very specific and precise about which axis I'm moving something on so I wanted a gimbal lock either way I have to hit a couple buttons to lock in access and I have to know exactly which axis it is to say okay G X Z like I have to know and so if I want to just go up left and then forward I would have to hit six keys in total to do that with the hotkeys because I'm not just gonna hit G and move it because I don't want it to be in camera space I don't want to be doing it from the cameras perspective I want to know exactly where it is and I know I can just assign the hotkeys to have these manipulators but that defeats the purpose of the hotkeys right and that's exactly how I want to do it I want to be able to use the manipulators and be very specific about this and I probably would have this be set to local because I need to be able to go up on the axis so little tweaks here but if I do want to move something around and then quickly go to rotation and do the same process it's important to me that I'm able to be very precise and not look away from the screen and not have to deal with a bunch of keyboard buttons that's gonna quickly do it that is one thing even though Maya's hotkeys make absolutely no sense q wenr like Q for selection wer e for rotation and R for scale but they're all right next to each other so our hands can just kind of sit there and go okay move it this way rotate it that way that's the I can switch very quickly through them also being able to undo without necessarily switching the object or world or global things I don't know there probably a preference for that in blender and if someone knows where that is I'd love to know because I know that if I I move this and then I switched to local and then I move it again well if I undo a couple of times it undoes that change to local I'd like to know how to switch that just in case but regardless the workflow I really need to be able to do is to quickly switch between these because they need to maintain that control and not look away from the screen for those specific moments but here's another thing Amaya if I were going to say translate or rotate let's go rotate this ball I can hit the plus and minus key minus minus plus plus plus plus it changes the size and sensitivity of this orb if it's very small little changes make the ball move around a lot make this bigger it's much less sensitive in blender based on our research we haven't been able to find anything to to change the size and sensitivity of these manipulators that the DreamWorks offer was interesting because it had a different slider for size and sensitivity in the interface almost like this overlay panel where you drop it down in their size and sensitivity and you could kind of control some different attributes of the selection or I like that a lot I actually liked having them not connected versus Maya where they were always the same sometimes I want to change the size and not the sensitivity things like that another thing that's very important to me is being able to just grab controls over here in the attribute editor and then middle Mouse drag anywhere in the viewer to make that change with this character this bouncing ball is not a whole lot to show you but if you have like a breath control or an F ki k switch or something where different values are more than just your basic translation tools it becomes a lot more clear why being able to grab a specific thing and then move it back and forth and in blender I'm not able to do that I can click and drag in this little field which I can also do in Maya but first switches and just various things I really like being able to minimize drag and I'm gonna come back to the middle Mouse manipulation stuff later but a lot of my initial issues come down to being able to be very specific about the control over certain axes now I want to dive into one of my favorite parts of the entire animation process the graph editor I love the graph editor I have a whole video on the graph editor if you are or a blender user and you struggle with the graph editor this will help it's done in Maya but it's the same principle in both software so I really like him blender just being able to make a new window like this and then switch it to something that is super quick huge fan of that versus windows animation graphic I'm used to it so it's fast but I like the the fluidness of a blender now recently in a twitch livestream I was trying to do a bouncing ball style animation in blender and in Maya and I did blender first and then I had to do it in Maya just to make sure I wasn't going crazy and just to see like wait is that the same or is that different anyway but I noticed a lot of differences when it came to the graph editor and some of them drive me crazy there's actually some things I really really love about blender blender has some amazing tools in the graph editor it's also missing a lot of things so I think both tools could really benefit from looking at the others pipeline I just noticed a lot more likely the blender going to add these things sooner then Auto does gonna add them to Maya just as a side note by the way both software's are good both software's have their strengths and have their weaknesses and you know there's cinema 4d and there's Houdini there's a whole bunch of other tools you don't have to say that there can only be one like we can have multiple that competition is healthy if there were only one tool we'd all be used to the same thing we'd never know what else is out there so having all these different tools that's actually really good to build on top of alright just setting a key in Maya hitting a sanic keys all keyable attributes very nice blender when I have to hit I which is way over here and then I have to select something and every time I want to key something I have to hit I and I have to select something I don't like that please don't make me do that something that Maya does by default by the way in the graph editor and so it's just why why would you do this to us this is the curve that's created if I go right in the middle there and I set a new key do you see how that changes do see that that tweak I just set a key why do you do this and I have I have other tips Maya tips videos of how to make it stop doing that the easiest way is just to right-click and say insert key that's the fastest way to add a key and I do that all the time that's like my fastest way in the ref editor I just add keys all the time that way Jeffie live in a blender if I have the same situation and I add the second key I don't yet know I I did this I did this right now doesn't really look like it's changing anything but I did this in my other thing I was doing and it did do the thing Maya did so I don't know I don't exactly how it works fingers crossed that this doesn't apply now here's one of the most important things to me when working in Maya when animating the graph editor when animating in general if I want to say I just want to see the translate Y so just the green one I just click translate Y and it solos it I don't have to go and uncheck a bunch of eyeballs go over here in blender I have to throw this down and then I can't just say oh which one is that first of all I can't grab the curve I hate not being able to grab the curve drives me especially in those situations where you have more than one key on top of each other like right here this red one and this blue one the intersect if I'm forced to is I can blend if I'm forced to have to grab the keyframe to grab that curve to find out like which one is it the tile lighting or whatever it is let's just say all the keys happen to overlap on each other and I have to start just unchecking things over here to figure out which one to which I don't want that because also here's another thing is if I grab say all the keys in Maya if I say you know what I only wanted to grab the green one I can control select and deselect anything I want I can obviously do the key frames you can do in blender but I can deselect an entire curve or a lot of curves and then deselect everything all the keys on all the curves that I had D selected because the curve is something that I can select and deselect and it applies to everything within it so if I jump over to blender and I grab all these things and I want to just say deselect this keyframe right here I can control click or shift click or whatever and I can deselect it but what I don't understand is why are the handles still there if I move all these it's still messing with that I can't fully deselect it and again maybe these are things that I can do not in the default settings I don't know but for a beginning animator or anybody who's learning the software there's almost always an aversion to changing all the hotkeys right away because you're afraid you gonna mess something up I've been there and this is not a very beginner friendly way to have to do it if you if you even can fix that Wow who animates like this I don't know maybe people do I don't I don't but here's the thing if I want to just deselect the entire green curve I can't use this to do it I can't use the red one I can't deselect a group of keys by deselecting the curve I'm left with no other choice than doing the individual keys but when they overlap with each other can't I can't like separate them but what's way more important to me than that is this if I have for example translate why I click it I filter it there it is fast I can just grab the entire curve by just drag selecting right-click insert key I can grab that key just the drag select and I can just middle Mouse drag up and down I don't have to aim or be precise I can just okay that curve add key grab it move it up so fast versus in blender you can't do that I can't grab the curve I have to specify okay with a key if I right click there is insert keyframe but I can't just kind of release to select I have to then click it which is an extra step there's no like right click middle mouse click left click modifier I have to aim and move it and that just ah it bothers me it's so much slower and maybe other people aren't as picky about this but like for me I'm just so used to just the speed of being anywhere in the window and just be able to move things around quickly just doing that really fast versus having to grab it it's not that much slower but it is slower it's like milliseconds but it matters especially if I were to grab a bunch of keys and move those or if I were gonna do the scale thing and I was gonna scale them from this point I can scale it from there right away I can scale it from down here right away you can scale from the middle right away being able to use the middle mouse to do the transformation scales and and translate some things it's very fast and the context to where like positioning of like where that pivot points going to be I'm very used to it but the lattice tool essential here's the lattice looks like you grab a bunch of keys you get this box and you can just kind of shape them super quick and just move around really great for bouncing balls things like that one more thing with the whole overlapping but in a better way in Maya there's this fantastic feature if you guys don't use this highly recommend checking it out it is a lifesaver there are three ways to view the graph editor inside of Maya there's absolute view stack view and relative view so hitting one on the keyboard two on the keyboard or three on the keyboard one in three are the two I default to most one is absolute it's where you have one big scale and if one values really really really really really far out there everything else gets really small it's hard to see things this is a really big value it's up at fifty five thousand units and the stuff down here is not so you end up having to like zoom in a lot not a super efficient workflow in general which is why the you know view normalized view exists it takes that scale away and every key every curve they now just kind of use their own scale it maximizes the amount of space being used that's our relative use so cool cuz absolute you may not see everything it may not not all fit you have like a character moving through space big values I've you know eye blinks very small values they don't all fit switch to relative mode suddenly you can see everything and contact very helpful but one mode and blender has that by the way too they have the normalized view which I actually like something about this better is normalized actually moves things from a scale of one to negative one a maximum and a minimum which makes a lot of sense if one is the maximum one and negative one of the minimum it becomes very clear of exactly what what the curve means I guess compared to Maya it behaves the same but it does actually have that at all it doesn't remap anything to a new value I do wish however that hitting the normalized view automatically took you to the normalized like zoom level cousin Maya if I have absolute normalized it just changes it I don't have to do anything right in blender this is my absolute I moved this super far away so that we can only see this all the other ones are really small in there if I hit normalized doesn't look like it like I lost the green one but it actually it worked the blender I have to hit the HOME key and then it will zoom me in to what is this I have a tangent handle that's doing all fans of crazy things okay and I'm sure if I am missing things and I'm not giving a super fair comparison again I'm not trying to like bash one of the other I'm just trying to show differences if I'm missing anything I'm sure the comments will help me out be gentle I'm learning another thing that I can't quite figure out maybe you guys can just help me figure out where this is to just reset a spline and just say ok back to your default automatic like clamped behaviors go back to whatever the computer wants you to do how the heck do I do that I've tried doing the whole like T we busy a and it doesn't reset it I've tried going V like a line didn't free and I've tried all these different things automatic oh look it worked this time I swear I tried that it didn't work before okay well maybe I'm just an idiot okay well anyway in Maya what I usually do is I just hit this Auto spline and it kind of resets it apparently is something different here my bad cross that off my list anyways when I was getting at is that if I have all the stuff here and I hit normalized it changes I have to hit home to then zoom out to see everything versus if I had normalized to oh it's gone again I have to hit home it's an extra step I need to do to actually zoom to fit the normalized view also if I hit the Delete key I want to delete the keys I don't want to have to hit a menu did people actually need that menu for a reason like I hate like hitting the button and like yes I'm sure bleeped all the way over there I mean it but I've been pretty harsh on blender today I've had a lot of notes a lot of things there's something in the graph editor that I think is amazing like the coolest thing I've ever seen in a graph editor ever the blenders God I've never seen it before if I click a curved X location for example and at the end key there's a modifiers thing here this is so cool but there's like noise for example you could just generate noise which is really cool you can mess with scale of that noise and the strength of the noise and the offset if you want to change it up a little bit dial it back you can then set limits to say maybe okay well don't start until this frame and maybe don't get quite that low that is so flippin cool to be able to just generate that kind of stuff procedurally in the graph editor I love that that's amazing my I can't do anything like that like that's really actually super intense let me move you dial that way way back and there you go that would take so much longer in Maya to figure that out but here's one more thing about Maya that I want to go back to and I want to kind of revisit something with a new twist if I have this curve into the key bring this down cool if I want to mess with this curve ivana for example look I'm scaling people see this in my videos all the time and I get this comment all the time on my graph editor video like how are you controlling that how are you making that happen right there all I'm doing is the middle mouse thing because I don't have to select it and I don't have to aim I can just kind of highlight it and grab a handle and move it around and if I break that tangent handle how quick it is to just say goodbye and then I can control like it's it's very quick and easy and if I want to quickly offset I can just hit the cycle button I know you can do that in the modifiers I like how fast it is and - to hit there it is but if I need to make changes I do have to kind of dial into the the menus but the thing I wanted to show is just how quickly I can adjust things with this middle mouse but by holding shift I can make sure that this either goes straight up and down there's no chance of it going left or right or vice first I left to right and no chance for going up and down now if I come over to blender I can't do the middle mouse thing at all and I also can't click to drag select over a tangent handle to do that there is actually a slight fix someone showed me on on twitch if I got a view I can't run on only selected curb handles whoops actually no whoops wrong one not that one deselect only selected keyframe handles and then I can see the handles for everything which is a little bit clutter II don't particularly want that to be guilty solution I am able to grab this because doesn't go away but again I can't middle mouse right mouse or left click and drag to do anything with it I have to then aim but if I were trying to do for example this tangent handle along its path straight out straight in or the keyframe trade up straight down left to right it's not quite as easy here either if I just click and drag it it will allow me to go anywhere if I hold ctrl it kind of steps in either direction which is interesting I'm not sure why you'd want to use that I'm sure there's reasons but just for me it I don't think I'd need that if I hold shift I have to move it first and then hold shift it becomes very very sensitive very non sensitive it's it's very slow which is good but again it's not locked anywhere so that doesn't really help me and if I leave this view area it actually kind of breaks it I lose track of it it like jumps away as soon as I leave the context of that panel and I know you can do the thing where it's like okay GZ I know that's an option but again my problem with that is that if I hit G it it allows me to move with the tiniest motion which with a pen in my hand is like slightly shaking at all times I lose that precision if I want to have exact control huh keys I don't want to have to be reliant on a hotkey to make that work I want to be able to control that just with that's the whole point to be using the stylus as I can kind of move it and push it around intuitively without relying on other tech devices also Maya has buffer curves I love buffer curves that ghost outline that I can switch between easily make changes non-destructively does lender have that that's not a complaint or a comparison like that's the genuine question haven't just found that yet does that a thing so let me know I know you can make this actually more opaque I think if I go to edit preferences animation F curve visibility right I can turn that up yeah so that becomes more visible the thing is though if I if I select these the curve I actually like in Maya how the curve lights up it turns white I can really see what it is the whole curve can I do that in blender I would really like to be able to not just have it get a little bit brighter when I select a curve because in this case so I have a really really hard to see and I said it shows up I'd like to be able to see all my curves all the time and then just maybe have one of them go white I like that is that an option can I do that now this is the last animation thing before I go on to the kind of DreamWorks wish list of stuff that I hope blender adds Maya has a dope sheet the dope sheet of Maya is informational at best and it does help you see where your keys are and what those keys are on the controls you can easily move all of your keys around and you can scale them and do things like that they're actually very useful let me use that a lot but beyond that doesn't tell you much you only pull it up when you really need it the timeline your primary mode of looking where your keys are and it tells you nothing except for the red tick marks and if you have sync selection on then the best thing you've got is if you grab a specific translation rotation whatever if you haven't have keys on that particular thing you'll see where those keys are you changed for different ones to disappear because you're not keys on that attribute that's the most information you ever really get blender has these little gray areas which show you where held keys are versus this you can also tag keys is like a moving whole or an extreme or I don't know jitter and what I've learned is you self tag them but being able to just add tags and have visual representation and it also just does this automatic things I think that's super powerful love that and I kind of alluded to this in my other video or I check out the animation tools for the first time DreamWorks had this thing where you could set a key at different levels and the same way that in blender here Maya has nothing like this but in blender it's like this all channel listed account all channels it's the same way of how in blender I can set a key that affects all of these things or I could probably just set a key that affects these three right here selected channels right like I could set keys at kind of different levels dreamworks of software is built around that concept it's not just a feature in this tool the entire software works in this way where you can have you know maybe the auto key works this way maybe it's when you set a manual key whatever it is you can have a set a key on just the wide translation or all translations or that whole part of the body that you selected that particular controller or the entire arm or the entire like character - the face or the character and the face or use that you know you move one little finger it keys everything in the entire shot you can kind of set the context of how big that keys going to be or if your retiming keys are you retiming the whole arm that part of the arm the whole character all the whole scene like you have such control over your whole scene just by your timeline in primo really really cool stuff was really confusing the first time I saw it but man was it efficient blender has kind of that energy but I don't think it really does the same thing but if it did oh now speaking of things you could do at DreamWorks that I really wish you could do in other software there are a few wishlist items that I have one thing I really miss about primo is the native tweening hotkey so a lot of us have used tools like tween machine or an about that half of this where kind of move between the adjacent keyframes right being able to just kind of shift left and right dreamworks software had that feature built into the software and you would hold the tilde key and it was the same type of deal where you would basically have your handle that said the keyboard you'd hold the tilde key and then you'd middle Mouse drag or left mouse click drag refer kitties I thought it was but you would have whatever controls you wanted you could have though every control in the entire character whatever you had selected you hold the button down you modify click and drag and it will give you a little visual like scale on the screen of like negative one to one and you can just kind of blend to the neighboring keys or however you wanted it to work you would also holds I think with control or shift I forget you'd hold one on the modifier keys after you dip tilde and you get the other thing and it would activate that little scale that go negative one to one it would go beyond and then you could overshoot very quickly so fast and so efficient DreamWorks also had a built-in studio library a pose library animation library there are plugins that do that you may have heard of things like that there is one out studio library I've tried it I like it it's missing some of the dreamers features because it's DreamWorks blenders are really powerful tool and I would not be surprised that they could replicate the type of studio library plugin add-on whatever you call it that DreamWorks had built in it was the same kind of thing where you could grab a bunch of controls you could double-click a pose and it would snap into that saved library that pose that you had and was cool as different artists could create their own little personal libraries if they had posed as they liked then they worked on and then they maybe said oh you're gonna be working on that character hey I have some poses that I have to get started and it was a really quick way to not like copy animation they're not like copying stuff it's it's a starting point it helps you get closer to where you want to be faster so you don't have to like okay I need to smile like it's not you skip that stuff you just get okay cool it's a smile let me customize you just go faster but you can apply it to everything you should apply to specific controllers only you could also use macros macros are the reason oh those the macros are the reason that I miss the studio library and probably the biggest thing I miss about primo in general I never animated fingers not once I've never had to like me all right the thing I do in Maya all the time never had to do that except for when I was tweaking and polishing because there were macros all the hand stuff like fists like finger curl or like this type of curl just the end like the tip curl or something display sheer spread that splits maybe the pinky I forget all the different things you would do with the hand thumb curl I'm Ben blah blah blah all that stuff they were macros and then you could just kind of say okay I want the hand to do this yes yes less of this more of this that dessert and you just kind of like additive or subtractive that behavior from the controls you just go left to right and you switch which hand you're doing it it was so cool if there's any people from blender who want to work on this kind of thing and like would like some input if you happy to share and I really miss it please add it tiny quality-of-life thing in primo it the HOME key did what Maya does where you at home and it takes you to the beginning of your shot which by the way just a useful key if you didn't know that if you're like moving around you I wanna start my shot over hitting home takes you back to the beginning kind of love that and then for some reason in Maya alt V is play blender spacebar that makes way more sense so a nice little blend of those hotkeys would be lovely you just double check that that's not the case no home zooms in what does F do I don't know but not what Maya does is what does F do here well just prefers yeah whatever what I wanted to get across in this video is that there are differences and some of the things are just that I think a lot of the blender tools were not developed for animators specifically or at least the tools that are there are older and that's fine because they seem to know that they're redoing a lot of their animation stuff and they they redo stuff all the time they're consciously make things better I'm really really looking forward to seeing what blender adds in new releases for animation these are some of the things that are very important to me I probably missed a ton of stuff I probably got some stuff wrong that I'm sorry I just really wanted to point out some of the things in Maya that we just even if that it is in there a lot of us who are trying to learn blender or having a really hard I'm dealing with because these are just things we're so used to in Maya and in a lot of cases they work actually really well but at the end of the day there are two things to consider on the artists side our workflow a workflow that you have been stuck with for a while that you're used to is very important everybody knows that like you if you have a workflow you enjoy you'd like to keep it as similar as possible to move over to a new piece of software that's not always possible but this always ideal right unless just a better way to do things which you know gotta be open to on the other hand I just spent this entire video complaining and wishing that there are all bunch of things different and then you go watch the open movies and clearly they're not having any issues that doesn't necessarily mean that the tools couldn't be improved don't forget at the end of the day the software is just the tool you don't have to have the tool to do all the things you wish you could do it's your job to see how far you can push what you've got to make it work which by the way last little thing about dream arcs here's a fun little tidbit for you did you know that every DreamWorks movie every single DreamWorks 3d movie except for Shark Tale and flushed away I believe up until home in 2014 32 13 14 everyone we have until that point was animated in a spreadsheet I mean that literally a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel if you have questions want to learn more about that come talk to me in the 24 hour stream hanging on Twitch I'll tell you the story if you enjoyed this hit this button somewhere people see it subscribe if you haven't already links below for everything else if you like the shirt now that we've talked about the graph editor link for that as well thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 194,646

Keywords: blender vs maya, maya vs blender, maya blender animation, blender animation, character animation, character animation tools, animation software, animation comparison, animation workflow, animation workflow blender, blender animation 2.9, blender animation 2.83, blender 2.9, maya animation, how to animate in 3d, 3d animation tutorial, which animatino software is best, maya or blender, blender for maya, blender maya tutorial, graph editor blender, graph editor tutorial, b3d

Id: L-vLraYGir8

Length: 35min 55sec (2155 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020