Fixing Blender's Graph Editor: Maya to Blender Animation Tips

foreign [Music] we're going to take a look at how we can simplify blender's graph editor and make it a lot easier to use so if you're coming from a different 3D application maybe like Maya or maybe you've used blender for a while but you actually haven't really dove into some of the settings within blender and that's what we're going to take a look at today so I want to show how we can make blender's graph editor just easier to use from an animator's perspective if you just look at the graph editor here I've got blender open up and at face value it looks very similar to most other graph editors and other 3D applications but by default the way blender displays the information to us is just way too complex it gives us way more information than we actually need and as animators or at least myself I like to simplify things and really only look at exactly what I need to be looking at when I'm animating so if I take a look at the graph editor here and we've got all of the channels over here on the left and in the center we actually we have all of the curves for this animation so these are all the curves that make up the actual animation so the first thing that I want to take a look at is this button right here so over here on the graph editor we have the only show selected so typically I want to have that turned on because if I'm working in the graph editor I don't want to see every single Channel over here for this character rig so we have the root control we have you know the leg controls we have the neck control so we have every single control here being displayed in the graph editor so you can see just how long this list is so there's really no reason to see all this information unless maybe you're scaling or re-timing your entire animation but the majority of the time I would just want to have this turned on so that way I don't have anything displayed in the graph header unless I come in here and actually select a control curve so I'm going to select my root control and this is just a basic Run Cycle animation that we have here so by turning this on that way it's only going to display the the controls that we have selected so in this case we have our torso control so we can come in here and you can see in the left side of our graph editor that's all we see and I can come in here and select each one of these channels and then if we select a different control that's going to be the only thing displayed there now if we want to select multiple controls and show them in the graph editor all we need to do is just shift select the controls and you can see it's going to pop up there in the graph editor so typically this is what I would do if I need to select multiple controls I'll just hold shift down rather than having this unchecked and then just getting this entire mess of Curves there so you usually want to always have that turned on so the next thing I want to take a look at is how blenders actually showing the keyframes and showing the controls within the graph editor so this is kind of the the default view that we get so I have currently my y rotation selected on my torso control so we see that curve highlighted here now if I go to view what I can do is turn off this only selected keyframe handles and this is really just kind of personal preference if I uncheck this you can see it's going to display the tangent handles for this curve here so it's displaying the tangent handles for all three keyframes there if you turn that on and then check it on it's only going to display tangent handles when you select that specific keyframe so this is the value I usually have it set to when I'm animating so that way I can just come in here and select the keyframe that I want and then that will display the tangent handle that way it keeps the graph editor a little bit cleaner here so I can go to view and uncheck that you can see it's going to again make it just a little bit messy so I'll just go ahead and turn that turn that back on now the next important thing that I want to take a look at is under view again and if we come down here to the only selected curve keyframe so you can see it says only keyframes of selected F curves are visible and editable so you can see right now my graph header is displaying all of the curves for this selected control curve but if I go ahead and turn this on what's going to happen is it's going to remove the keyframes but we still see the curves of the actual animation so if I come in here and I select let's say Y location or actually let's select something that actually has some movement on it so maybe I'll select the maybe like Z again so we can see this so what's happening is that we aren't displaying the curve keyframes for all the other Curves in our graph editor so you can see that we're only now displaying the keyframes for the selected channel that we have but we still are seeing the curve so if I go ahead and uncheck this you can see when we see the the keyframes pop up for those unselected curves and we can turn that back on and this right here is probably the the biggest issue I found with blender's graph editor and that's just the fact that it displays all the control curves all at all times in this sort of like ghosted view here even if you only select that channel so even if I have this only selected curve keyframe so I only want to display the curve keyframes for the channel I have to selected it's still going to display this ghosted curve here which when I'm animating and I'm editing a curve like that I usually don't need to see the other curves there's really no reason for me to come in here and edit my y rotation curve and then see the Z rotation to curve as this kind of ghosted display it doesn't really help me it just muddies up the graph editor View and just makes it more difficult to animate so the way we can fix this is we can either select the individual channel that we want and we can press shift H and then you can see all the little eye icons are going to close and that means it's hiding every single Channel That's not selected so I selected my y rotation hit shift H and then that hid everything that's not selected so that way we're getting a much cleaner view of our curve so we don't see those ghost curves making it much easier to edit this curve now if we press alt H that's going to show everything again so if you want to come in here we can you know select the Z rotation shift h to isolate it to remove those ghosted curves alt H to show everything again so this is one way we can do it but this is actually not the best way I usually don't like having to use a keyboard shortcut like that to show and hide my curves just to make it easier to use the graph editor so what we can do to fix this is let's go ahead and you know select the Y rotation just one single curve and you see we have all of these ghosted frames or these ghosted curves that we don't have selected again just muddying up the graph editor view so to fix this let's go to file or excuse me let's go to edit preferences and we want to go into the animation tab so by default the unselected opacity curve is set to around a value of 0.2 so it's set to 0.25 so you can see that this is going to increase the opacity of the curves that are not selected so this is what gives us the ghosted curves within graph editors so that means even if we come in here and we turn on the show only selected curve keyframes we're still going to see these ghosted curves so to remove this just bring this all the way down and that way you completely remove that ghosted curve and we don't have to use the keyboard shortcuts to isolate and show only one channel we can actually come in here and select all these now and we don't get the ghosted curves and we're just able to work with a much cleaner graph editor if you're coming from Maya this will be very similar to how Maya displays the curves it's not going to create you know ghosted curves for every single channel it's going to start out like this where everything is you know isolated when you just highlight it within the graph editor so these few settings to adjust are probably the most important settings when you're working with a graph editor this makes it just much easier to work in blender's graph editor I'm not sure why these settings aren't the default settings there's really no reason to have the ghosted curves displayed at all times it I've found it doesn't help me at all it just muddies up the graph editor view it's displaying every curve that I don't need to see especially when usually when I'm using the graph editor it's going in there to make you know small edits to Curves and then seeing every other curve displayed at the same time just makes that even more difficult so hopefully this was helpful for you and maybe if you found issues with blender's graph editor maybe this will simplify it and make you know using blender for animation a little bit more enticing so as always if you have any questions make sure to leave them in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe and like [Music]

Channel: Mark Masters

Views: 4,708

Keywords: graph editor, blender tutorial, blender, Maya vs. Blender Animation, Blender Animation Tools, Improving Blender's Graph Editor, Streamlining Blender Animation, Blender Animation Curves, Blender Animation Keyframing, Making Blender Graph Editor User-Friendly, Blender Animation for Maya Users, Blender Animation Shortcuts, Mastering Blender's Graph Editor, Blender Animation Keyframe Editing, animation tutorial, how to animate, beginner animation

Id: 1CxevABgejE

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023