How to Use AnimBot - Tool Guide & Tutorial

for you animators if you'd like to animate faster if you'd like to struggle less with the technical side of Maya and just get the stuff that's in your head into your animations into scenes this videos for you welcome back everybody I'm still waiting case you're new here and today we're gonna be talking about Anna bond and if you don't know what Anna bot is is a collection of tools if you have used it before you know that it's massive you probably haven't gotten to even try half the stuff that's in it and it's probably overwhelming to look at at times but in this video my goal is to show you the stuff that I use every time I'm animating and some hidden gems that in the process of learning every single thing in there that I could to make this video I don't even realize it was in there myself I will be glossing over some other stuff that maybe I haven't looked into as much or don't know the value of I'm going to show you as much useful stuff as I can and hopefully give you a better understanding of what this toolset can do for you and how to use it once you download it and if this is your first time watching any of my videos hi welcome and if you have been here before you haven't yet subscribed hit that subscribe button yes it is my birthday and as a gift you know subscribe you can always change your mind later it's free if you really like my stuff and you want to go one step further to help supporting the channel there's a link to my patreon down below and if you'd like to see me test out these animal futures live or if there's stuff that I didn't cover you want to talk about whatever it is coming out with me over on Twitch three days a week I go live and do a ton of animation stuff over there links to everything down below including a link to Anna Boch there gem sprinkled throughout this video so I recommend highly that you watch the entire video because there's a lot of stuff beginning at the end and the very last thing I'll say if you are new to animation if you're just starting out I do not recommend that you dive right into Anna bots and start using these tools like I'm about to show you why because you need to know how to do most of this stuff on your own with just the Noah basic Maya no tools or plugins because if you get hired in an animation job somewhere in the industry and for whatever reason you don't have access to these tools you need to be able to do your job with or without any tools any scripts any plugins so if you are just hanging out for most tools I recommend that you learn how to do it on your own first and then ease into using some of these things so that's my caveat don't use this or any other tool as a crutch to do something that you can't otherwise do in Maya but it's up to your judgement to tell the difference between the that's just dumb technical that this just makes it easier and the stuff that you should know how to do on your own that's it let's get into it here we go this is the demo project for my animation layers video hopefully you saw that video it's very good one and it's not a finished animation that's just for demo so we're gonna go with it now Anna bot is all these colorful icons down at the bottom of my screen right above my timeline on the far left you have the Anna bot menu which is where you can access your preferences check your version check for updates all that kind of stuff and if for any reason you do not like having these pop-ups when you mouse over stuff you just don't want that you know the tool you can go ahead and right-click go to system and you can actually say show tooltips and turn that off we're gonna come back to that on the far right I just want to show you the search bar so if you hit that every Anna Boch tool is in here so if you know what you're looking for but you don't know where to find it you can start typing and it'll show you not only the tool but the tool help for that tool what's more impressive to me that I really want to point out to you is the hotkeys menu if you open the end about hotkeys window it gives you everything every single n about command is in here somewhere and I highly recommend you just browse through and just look at each thing mouse over it it will tell you what everything does and it gives you a really good idea of everything this tool can do and I want to show you that you can combine that with the if you go to Windows and go to settings preferences hotkey editor this is Maya's default hotkey editor so if you're looking for something in Maya to see oh am I already using a certain hotkey am I not you can go by application commands if you're like oh how do I set a key you can type in set key and it'll show you the different hotkeys available for that command or if you just say ok well what do I have mapped to the letter S if I go to the hotkey version and type S it'll show me any hotkey involving the letter S I highly recommend you guys give this a shot I know teaching hotkeys freaks a lot of people out you'd want to mess with a default you want to break anything just quick thing here in the top left corner there's a hotkey set you actually go to this little settings cog and you can duplicate it you can duplicate Maya's settings for your hotkeys rename it to something else and then have at it just go crazy and change whatever you want because you can always go back to the default you can always reset this just like when you get in the car you want to change that the rearview mirror you want to change the side mirrors maybe you won't want to adjust your seat if you can't reach the pedals if you can't see out those mirrors you're not really driving at peak efficient see it's the same with using a tool like Maya if you don't use half the keyboard and you could to make things easier for you you should look into that as a quick side down about hotkeys I use a ton I customize my keyboard with the Maya hotkey editor I have these palette buttons and I also use Elgato stream deck I use it for streaming obviously but I do use it for animation I have these little LED screens where I can put names and titles and folders and now if you guys have seen my rig review videos then you know that when I open a rig I have a lot of things I like to change about that rig setting kind of those defaults they follow a line or global control maybe it's visibility controls or maybe for my animation I don't want to consider this a pose or T pose or whatever as I'm using as the default pose when I hit default maybe I don't like what this looks like maybe I want to adjust the way the face looks and just started a more appealing starting point for my animation once you have it to where you like it you just select every control involved right click this power button looking icon and say snapshot preferred pose this is a great way to set your preference of FK rik arms or legs or even a face pose a little bit more appealing that matches kind of what you're going for it now the reason you'd want to do this right at the beginning of your scene or somewhere early on so maybe you try a pose and you don't really like where it ended up maybe it's just the arm you don't like so you select the controls you want to start over with and you just hit that that reset button and it resets the pose back to your default that you told it to be and if you've got the entire character you could just hit the reset pose and it'll bring him back the benefit to snapshotting it first is if you did make any adjustments to the FK to the I K to the follow line type of stuff when you hit reset it'll go back to whatever the actual default is so if you didn't set that default pose and you made those changes you then have to go make those changes again which is a waste of time so say you pose out this horribly creepy face and you decide that's not really what I want to go for maybe I want the eyebrows back to normal or something you can individually click the specific controls you want to put back to normal which just a lot of clicking will go back to this in a second or you could do the whole face whatever you want you hit reset and it goes back to whatever pose you told it to be so the next one is called smart key you're gonna want to set this up and then you'll probably forget about it but it's going to be awesome I don't know if you've noticed this but when you're animating in Maya and you're in your graph editor say I've got this control and here's our curves watch before and after I'm gonna just hit a set a key see how it tweaks the curve on the left and just how they're different it's just messing stuff up Maya does a really bad job when you hit set key now there is a way to not have to deal with that and if you just click all these curves right click and say insert key it does a much better job of just placing the key in there but that's extra clicks that's a pain in the butt another thing Maya doesn't do a very good job of have you ever been blocking your blocking your animation and let's say you're in stepped right normally in Maya when you're scrubbing around in step mode and you go to set a new key with your blocking you hit s and suddenly it converts it right back to Auto tangent and you end up with spline e weirdness where you're kind of in-between spline and stepped pain-in-the-butt it has no idea which type of tangent you're keying on and how to put another key of the same type within that range enter smart key come back to your end about hotkeys and look here there's set smart key and set smart key all channels the difference is sets marquee will only key the values that you've already key like if you just set a key on translations it won't actually set a key M rotations if you didn't already have one kind of like Auto key does versus if you have set smart key all channels it'll do everything just like s in Maya keys all the attributes of a certain control sets marquee all channels do the same stuff pick whichever one works best for you or do both I just have these other hotkeys so I can show you what they all do at the same time but take one of these this is probably the closest behaving and just set it to s override your regular set key and just hit this button that way when you hit s in the future it doesn't affect anything negatively it just sets a key in the proper tangent space so it doesn't tweak your curves and if you have a curve range that is set to stepped tangents where before you hit s and it turn to spline now you hit s I come back over here it's context aware it knows which version of the splines you have active and you don't really have to worry about it from that point makes your block you much much easier next up select sets this is something I get asked all the time how to do on stream so when you are animating a character let's just use the face of this example because it's a perfect opportunity to show all these different controls sometimes they can be overwhelming and maybe you want to set a key on every brow control or you want to reset all the brow controls or whatever it is I'm gonna sit here I'm gonna click every single one of these takes me forever I don't like doing this more than once and if you over sit there grabbing lots of controls all fingers all the browse all the arm everything on the body whatever it is you spend some time doing that and you understand why you'd never want to do it again so what I can do is select whatever I want and then I can come down and hit this little purple square button for select sets I'll just call this browse all and you can pick a color so it now becomes a button that I can just click there and it will give me control over every brow control so if I want to reset them to default I can easily just put them back to normal those specific controls if I were using studio library and wanted to just control those and works for that as well if I wanted to set a key on everything brow and I were blocking out the face this makes it much easier to do so if I wanted an upper eye control I can hit another button and I just call this up i right and so now I've got the brows I've got the upper eye if I click them it'll switch to the different ones if I shift click it'll add it to my selection I can control click to remove it from selection all the same Maya shortcuts still apply I even have one from Maine which gives me all of the main body controls that I was using to block my animation here you can do this with Mel scripts as well but this is much easier you just click what you want give it a name and now you have a button for it if you need to change the button at any time you can right click on the button you can say isolate contents and it will literally show nothing but what you have so you can do this with geometry you can do this with controls so if I want to go ahead and show everything again I can uh nice elate the controls so that's a good way to just focus on a specific part of the character's body if you don't have that built in to the rig or the display layers if I right click again I can say add selection so if I wanted to add I don't know the head control to that for some reason I can right click the Browse and say add selection and now when I click it it includes the head control and you see there it is working or oops didn't mean to do that I can click the head right click and remove selection and now it no longer involves the head and if you have multiple characters in the scene you might not want to have all these of controls like the eyes of this character the eyes of this character you can actually set it in two different tabs that's what this little button here is here this little s shell thingy you can also isolate or hide or show colors so if you want to focus on just facial stuff you can hide all the body controls or vice-versa things like that so if you build an entire set character controls for a rig because you're going to use this rig through all your animation mentor classes are through five different shots that you want to work on for another project you can kind of build it out however you want for that character and then customize what you're dealing with in the moment and if you are doing that something I would recommend checking out is you can right-click on the original selection set button down on the shelf and you can actually import and export the selection sets if you want to share this with another artist or you want to back it up to make sure you don't lose it if you spent all this time doing it and you don't want to crash your scene and things like that there's a button for that now this next one I feel like most people are aware of for just in case I'm going to cover it it is kind of the tween machine or between slider part of this and there's a little bit more to it than a lot of people realize so let's jump into it it's these yellow sliders these are the this TW one is the tweener a lot of people are familiar with an older tool called tween machine this does essentially the same things what it is is this so I'll just go to this frame I'm gonna grab the character and her feet and this is kind of the center point of the jump right so here is where she's jumping off here's where she's landing this is the middle point and I probably want to right in the middle but let's say I don't let's say I want to favor that pose I can use the entire character like I've got I could Jeb I could grab one specific control one specific curve just one control translate X or rotate Y or whatever I want but let's just say I've got everything and I'm gonna start to slide in that tweener around I'm just gonna grab this slider and start moving it if I drag this all the way to the left you'll see that it'll start to go back towards the frame before or I can drag it all the way at the right now you may notice that what happened when I started dragging it actually snapped down I'll undo that you can see it snapped down low why did it do that because it's trying to go in between between err the previous and next the two adjacent keys so if you consider this frame and that frame is the two adjacent keys well the middle point is not up in the air it's like right down along along the water so if I drag this anywhere it's gonna snap her down to the water and try to float me between those two frames right so that's what the tweener does it'll try to go between two key frames so if you're trying to blend somewhere like an eye kfk thing it's gonna give you a really nice midpoint between two keys depending on where you favor it but let's say that's not what you're looking for you're looking for a different kind of tween there are so many others I can actually hit this little arrow drop-down and you can see all these gold sliders these are all different types of tweens there's a regular betw machine which is exactly what we just saw this is blend to buffer so if you've got buffer curves you can do that there's no bunch of the things you've got blend to default so that'll actually try to bring her controls back to whatever your rate default is this will blend the ease and so on but what's really important about all these different sliders as you should mouse over all of them see which ones you think you're gonna like the best and tag the ones you like because for example the only three that I have tagged are the regular tween blend to default and blend to ease in case I ever wanted to set a whole bunch of key frames to ease in really nicely I actually don't really use that one all that much so if I didn't want to hear any more I could just hit this little glowing icon and I could unpin it so when I Rika lapse this menu with this little arrow I only see the tween machine and the blend to default I got rid of that other one and I actually do use one more of those sliders I actually use this blend to normal this bn1 a lot but if I were to mouse over the tween machine and hold shift it actually switches to blend adorable so that's how I use it but anyway this is not so I blend a normal blend to neighbor this will blend to the neighboring key from its current position so it allows me to favor a pose or favorite key without it trying to snap into wherever it thinks that center point is so so the regular tween machine might snap me kind of far away I don't like that if I hold shift it won't snap it away it'll just start to blend with in the current pose that's how I use the tweener I either just click and drag it or you can click these buttons to go fifty percent in one direction or whatever but I use shift more than anything I hold it down and go to blend tune neighbor if you don't like holding shift and that confuses you what you're gonna want to do is hit this little arrow right there expand the tool group it'll show you all the sliders and if you wanted to add that as of just a regular slider I'd say the N right here this one I'd click this little pin button now it's glowing I'm gonna collapse this it's now one of my highlighted sliders in here one more thing if you deal with gimbal lock a lot if you are moving the arms around and you you often you're trying to tween between two poses and your arm is doing weird stuff and you're using the Euler filter if you know what that is there's actually a thing way over here on the right this little e thingy that is an Euler filter pass built into the tweener this will help prevent gimbal lock if you're dealing with wrists and arm stuff but if you're trying to have it character do a flip in you're trying to have them actually flip around like this little tip says you may want to turn this off because it'll think that that flipping is an issue so just a heads up that that exists if you want to use it you can click on it and turn it on and then when you start to use the tweener it'll automatically do an oil or filter pass as your tweening for tangent types you could do it in the graph editor click that button or you could do it with animal click that button the thing I find really useful is to set that to different hotkeys or on my stream deck so I actually have buttons on here just to switch to different tangent types so I can go between linear step Auto very quickly also have regular mile hotkeys for breaking tangents unifying tangents amplifying tangents all kinds of different stuff in the bottom right corner of anabolic on this little cube icon there's selection display what that does is when I have nothing select you can see right here there's a little a0 if I select the head control it'll say 1 if I just click and drag and select it'll say 61 and it just tells me how many things I have selected that tells me at a glance do I have everything I wanted 240 I've got the whole rig it's a small thing but if I ever noticed something weird in the timeline and I see more Keys than I should or less it's a good place to check to say oh I'm missing something or have something extra align objects is awesome I'll just quickly show you what that does if I say this one I want it to go to this spot right I could sit here and try to move it and match it and whatever or I could just say you you and then I click this button and it just puts it in the exact same spot the two origins match perfectly but it eliminates any copy-pasting of values or fiddling with different you know rotating to make sure I have it all on the right place it's just there it's just good it also works with rotation so if I take this ball and rotate it just as an example now I'll do it the reverse way I'll say cone go to the cube I could just right click and say just align the orientation and now it'll rotate them to match so it's customizable how you want to use it you can actually use this to fake a constraint I can actually select that cone and let's just say I want to stick it to her foot I can select an entire frame range right-click the align objects I'll just say align all keys it'll look like it's constrained even though it really isn't and what's nice is it doesn't even bake it to every key so it's not even on ones temp pivot or temporary pivot this one's super super useful especially if you've got a character who's interacting with the prop or leaning on a table or anything like that mainly with things that are an IKE a let me show you so let's say you've got somebody resting their hand on a table you want to rotate maybe they've got their hand on the table and you want them to kind of press up on the fingers so you want the fingers the fingertips to stay put and you want to kind of rotate around that point well with most ika hands you rotate from the wrists so if you wanted to have those fingers stuck you'd have to set a key on this frame and then you'd have to you know rotate this and translate it and then most move those fingers it'd be kind of a lot you'd have to really fake it but if we enable the temporary pivot is this button right here I'll show you temperate you click on it and it gives you a a temporary like hey this is where we're gonna be rotating from so your first thing is to move this to wherever you want to rotate from and also make sure so I'll check the different season let's just say we're gonna rotate from the middle finger and I specifically want to rotate from the table I want at that point lock imagine this as like a nail or an anchor this thing's not moving whatever connected to this point it's not moving also make sure that it is rotated to your satisfaction that is pointing the correct way for the easiest animation when I'm ready I can hit my rotate or my translate tool and now it's gonna rotate the I K hand that I was messing with before but it's gonna rotate it from that point which is super powerful because when I set a key now it's still gonna set a key on this it's just moved this control from a new point super super useful and now that I've clicked away like obviously I can still control it from here if I change my mind but if I need to go back to it I just click on temp if again and it allows me to change where I'm rotating from so if I say nope don't want to change anything I actually really like where this is that I don't to alter anything just keep going just let me keep messing with stuff I can even create a temp it for I don't know just say the body I want to rotate the body around the table also I don't know the tables gonna just like flip her around so whoo and then I go back to the hand I had ten pivot it remembers for each control where you had a temporary pivot located god dang it in situations like that I just crashed my ax I don't know what I think I hit the Delete key and that was completely accidental I deleted my ax I actually did not have a certain feature turned on like many of you don't as well if you're not using antibody you don't have access to this but what happens when you crash your Maya scene well we cry for a while and then we have to go back and reanimate however if you have an ax but you don't have to cry for long because there's an and recovery tool that I don't have turned on for some reason I should have had it turned on but I didn't it's this heart icon in the bottom right corner called an ax more cover E and it's pretty much like Time Machine on a Mac and essentially what it'll do is it'll keep check point this is what Maya's autosave wishes it could be especially when you're on a student version and sometimes it crashes before you get the opportunity to hit continue on that stupid little prompt that comes up and it doesn't save anything this will save you you can restore your entire animation scene back to whatever it was at whatever time if you want to restore it to right before your crash 20 minutes before however frequently you want it tries to keep track of that kind of stuff and you can make changes or if you like most of what you had but you actually just want to restore maybe the right arm to what you had yesterday cuz you've worked all day today on that arm and everything else is looking good but that arm just looks pretty stupid you can just set that arm to yesterday's backup and keep what you've got for everything else so you can do it by control the whole scene whatever you want but it will save you in case of a crash or serious issues you'll want that now removing the category to now stuff that I use less frequently but I still either use it enough or itself that I haven't gotten a chance to really use depending on what I've been animating level 2 here we go I've set our character back to blocking let's just say we're blocking the scene right have you ever been in the situation where you're blocking different controls and maybe you forgot to grab for example these these knee pull vectors or the elbow I K pull back to things things like that things that are floating away and you maybe not having them every time you said aqui as an example I've got the hip control here right I've got keys set throughout my timeline but if I click on those me controls I don't have as many keys they stop it like frame 51 there's nothing else after frame 51 but if I click on my hips there's clues supposed to be stuff after 51 and so you sit there you've got both sets of controls you end up going through setting a key study key set key psyche psyche psyche just so you have like markers in your scene of where you were supposed to have frame set I don't know if you guys have dealt with that but if you know what I'm talking about you know the struggle so especially for blocking something you can do is this share Keys button this will allow you to just say you know which control has the keys which control do you want to put the keys on you can do for your whole you know set of controls the whole character whatever or just a couple what have you want so let's say I want the hips I've got keys on 39 40 44 all the way down to 66 and I want to put them on these knees which don't have anything past 51 I want them to match so I'm gonna say hips over to the knees just shift select them and then I'm gonna hit this button that's all it took and now I've got keys on all the proper frames that these knees need to have keys on to match the blocking of my other layers so if you go through and block your whole shot with just a few controls and then you want to make sure that everything was keyed on those frames grab all the controls and say share keys it'll go through and set a key on everything that doesn't already have a key based on something else this will help so that if you move to spline you don't have something that's kind of drifting the whole time because you didn't set more than one key on it and it's interpolating across the entire shot and you just said that one thing that's drifting for no reason because you didn't key it here's one for you have you ever done a walk cycle and then realize partway through that you maybe didn't have the hips low enough or high enough or twisted a certain way or you pretty much just realized like oh I had the character really high the whole time and now the knees are popping I just I need the character lower through the whole shot there are ways around that you could deal with stuff the graph editor or you can use the global offset button which is this little diamond button here I can just click the global offset button and I'm just going to remove the character down a bit and you see the entire animation curve shifts the entire thing all the keys on it see that alternatively if you only need a certain section I can who's hold shift I can drag through the section I want to make that change through and then click the global offset button now when I make the change you can see everything on the left is adjusting anything on the right of the graph is not changing so that's a way you can make a global change to everything and the example they haven't here is really nice if I just kind of mouse over you see they actually use it to rotate the character's head and since the fist is constrained to the head it all still works really nicely I feel like I should mention the east letter I don't use it very often but I think you should know about it it's this EA slider right here in the middle let's just say this control we're really low and I wanted to adjust all these to ease in or out of one of those poses I either ease out of this pose or into that pose I'm getting some weird tangent stuff so I just hit the auto tangent button and now it's going to nicely he's out or he's in very quickly here's another one it's called mirror or Auto mirror so you may be familiar with mirroring in Maya in general it's symmetrical posing where if you turn on auto mirror you know and you move one control it moves the other control the same way and that's something but I'm gonna talk about auto mirror you can mirror pose so let's say I want this this arm pose on both sides I can just click the mirror button with those selected and it'll transfer it to the other side of the rig super easy super nice so if I had the contact pose of a walk cycle and I selected both sides and then mirrored each side they would switch so you could do one contact pose grab the whole thing and then swap it for the other pose so it's a really quick way to do cycle type of stuff as well so I can use the auto mirror to move both of the elbows at the same time make sure they're symmetrical normally you wouldn't want this this is called twinning I don't want these to be the exact same all the time or that's really boring for posing but just for this example if I want to have this character holding this ball right I could constrain it to the hands or can turn the hand to the ball or do all kinds of different things but if I just want to cheat it really quick what I can do is say hand hand and I want the ball to actually be the thing driving all of this mouse over this chain link one it's the X form relationship now there's a bunch of stuff with copy and pasting X forms but if I just say Auto relationship so if I just alt click on this chain one it creates a relationship between all three of these that even though they're not constrained I'm using one of their locators to move all three or one of their pivot points so it gives me like an IKE a control for a group of controls which is really insane like if you know how constraints work and what a pain they are then seeing this should kind of blow your mind because I can I can set a key and then go here and then set a key here it looks like I haven't broken it you may experience some weird rig breakage stuff my recommendation would be get the stuff to where you want it and then click on the controls you want to key and then key all the stuff just to be safe sometimes it's weird but if you undo a couple of times like it I'm not sure you're supposed to use this exactly which is again why it's in tier two the second category where I don't use very often but I feel like you should know about this because just being able to do that we didn't constrain anything but with two clicks we had what was effectively a constraint no complicated technical stuff I should disable the relationship between these objects I think that's what I need to do so there we go now I can yeah so you turn it off that's pretty cool that's almost like a one-click constraint that you kind of turn on and off for your own workflow I don't know that's you should know about it there you go enjoy another one is select all rig controls I've showed you a couple things like the pose at the very beginning or we selected all the controls of the rig they're gonna be times where you want to keep everything right and when that happens or whatever situation you find yourself in where that needs to happen you could sit there you know grabbing everything but when you do this I just ride to grab everything I don't have the FK skeleton I have the ika hands right like that's the ikn but if I switch this wrist or whichever wrist this is there to the I caressed that I cake those I controls weren't selected so if I go ahead and grab all this and I'll deselect that reselect it and then I'll switch to okay look at these weren't grabbed gotta add those gotta add those when are you ever gonna remember to do that that's such a pain that's what the selection sets are really good for so those buttons where you can say like give me the the arm I can't and FK said I can both that's that's beneficial selection display as well being able to say like what do I have click on that little number here's what I have maybe I want to deselect a few of these I forgot to mention that you can do that but maybe you just wanna grab everything on the rig including the face controls including all the hidden stuff grab one control I hit the search bar and I start typing select all now there's select all animation curves in the scene that's more for your graph editor select rig controls get that double click it it will grab everything so if I do the same thing will deselect the hand control reselect it turn it to I guess in this case it's FK it's got the FK stuff control selected I can go into the face I can turn on the face controls those are all selected they're bright white they wouldn't be if they were deselected everything's controlled and there's 364 things in total so that's the thing you can go to if you just go to search and select all rig controls I'll give you everything so in case that's helpful for setting one massive key there you go back to the scene for another tip let's say you were going to shrink this animation you want to compress it down scale it down make it shorter make it faster if I grab all these controls or keys shrink it make it take 1 second 20 frames or 24 frames there we go the whole thing happens super quick now all the animations still in there but we have a lot of animation on subframes you don't usually want that so so here between frames 11 and 12 you have stuff that's on 11 points one two and like you have all this other stuff so if I take all these curves and I left click and drag I can right click and I can tell Maya to snap and it will for the most part whenever Maya can snap it will the problem with Maya is that if there's two keys that are contesting for the same new spot it won't make that decision for you it doesn't know which one to delete so it won't if I go to the Animus search bar smart snap keys it does a better job of keeping your animation intact now I condensed a lot of stuff in there normally you don't do something quite as intense it does a better job of Maya than keeping those poses intact and preserving what you originally had enemies so now it's just going really fast another very helpful thing to do it's called bundle snapshot it's not exciting it's not sexy it's not something you'd think you'd really need but I'll show you why you do it does the kind of set default pose and a few other things that are very useful all at once so sometimes you have rigs that when you grab the FK arms and you move them up they both move up together personally I really like when that's the case but other times you have rigs that don't do that the axes are flipped and when you grab both arm controls they move inversely I don't know if that affects a lot of you but for me I'm not a huge fan of that happens though happens with a lot of rigs actually if I were to select a control on this rig and go to the search bar select rig control get everything in the rig just to be sure I'm gonna do another search and I'm gonna say bundle snapshot this is gonna snapshot everything in the rig it's gonna ask me if this is the default pose yes it is because it needs to be the default pose it'll scan the rig figure out the deal with it and it will give me some really cool stuff now what it won't do is change the way that this thing rotates so you know that's no different however it will analyze the left on the right side to the rig to figure out okay what are the arms what are you elbows what are the corresponding controls so if I wanted to mirror something or flip something I can so what I can do now is activate auto mirror which I kind of showed you earlier but in this case it's now analyzed the rig to know those are both arms that's how I want to animate them and now I can do that I don't even have to grab both controls say I'm doing that walk cycle thing maybe on this side I'm going forward and on this side I'm going back all right so let's say that's my pose for the contact pose let's just say it's a twenty frame rock cycle with my contact my contact in the middle I got to flip it so all I'm gonna do is hit the mirror button and since I did the bundle snapshot its analyze the rig it knows what's what so now it mirrors the phone perfectly and I've just saved a ton of time say I grab all these finger controls and I'm you know messing with them and making a pose I like and then I want to select the other hand to do something similar well samus well she has a gun so this was probably a bad example but but this little double arrow button right here is select opposite and if there were other controls I can actually kind of mess with the gun which is interesting it would jump to the other side of the regen have the opposite control you get the idea now we're moving into category three honorable mention now that doesn't mean that these aren't good tips so stick around because there are some true gems in here it's just stuff that either I've never used before or I didn't even know it existed until making this video so I can't speak to experience as much as I just want about you know it exists check it out see if it's gonna help you the first I'm gonna give you is something that can help everybody if you're dealing with a heavy rig which a lot of us are so when you get to higher level classes or things like that where you've got faces when you have a heavy rig and your computer's struggling a little bit maybe you want to make a bunch of changes here have you ever dealt with where you try to drag something and it's just it's not fast you feel that Maya is slowing down because it's trying to calculate the viewport it's trying to make those changes live in the viewport and you guys know the feeling where you're waiting you're waiting you've made a change in the graph editor and you're waiting and then finally it changes like a sound I want it at all that's awful and you go to change back that takes forever well there's a big stop sign down here it will stop the viewport from recalculating which of using the graph another means you can do everything instantly you get absolute speed make all the changes you want if you know what you're doing in here you can fly through your changes or at least iterate a lot faster and then when you're ready to go let me just do something and then undone speeded up it'll then recalculate it doesn't - do it live or if you'd want to keep going on and off on and off or with a huggie or something if you alt click the stop sign it'll go to auto suspend a viewport so when you're making a change it's super fast and when you release it recalculates so it puts a little bit of lag but it's not like bad lag it's lag that you're in control of so that you work as fast as you want to work and then it updates instantly and you're like don't want that change it back and forth back and forth versus sitting there trying to drag slowly and just fighting my of a whole way right next mention is the bookmarks now Maya 2020 has bookmarks built in but the bookmarks in Maya and the bookmarks an antibody different neither one has all of the features of the other I would expect Anna bot to add Maya's features before Maya a 10 and emboss features what you can do is select a range on your timeline click the bookmark button section a and it will bookmark that section of the timeline I'm gonna grab another section do the same thing you can actually have Maya kind of lock your timeline to certain moments so if you're doing game animation you're doing a bunch of cycles or you're trying to just kind of break your shot up into chunks different phrases if you haven't seen this video I highly recommend watch it it's got a lot of animation tips on phrasing and a bunch of other stuff I learned a tenday animation workshop especially if you're not in Maya 2020 yet then you don't have any kind of bookmarks and then that's what you're gonna be using exclusively if you're using my 2020 you have some other options with Maya stuff but that's what Anna Bhatt has in their tool copy and pasting a pose or entire animation data all of it this button here is your copy pose if I go to this frame and just grab all that and say copy I'll move over here I'll just control click I'll say paste it'll just paste the animation onto that frame and I've never used this button but there is a copy animation if you don't take the entire animation or something maybe you want to take your entire all everything on the character and move it to a different character and just copy the animation or maybe something broke and you need to move it from this Maya scene to a new Maya scene you can do that maybe you want to take just the translate Y and move it to the rotate X and just kind of move stuff there you can just stuff manually or you can use this button to do copy animation I have not used it so I can't help you if you're having stuff with it but like there it is alright a few gems that are hidden inside the hotkey window again I recommend going through here and seeing what there is I skip a lot of stuff so explore and see what I've missed if there's anything you really want to use but I'm gonna go into extra tools for a lot of this last stuff here for example there's deselect non key to items so I'm gonna turn on the face I haven't really done anything with a face so just to show you what this usually looks like I'm gonna go ahead and share keys to everything based on the hips just so I can key all the face stuff let's just say I I was blocking and I put keys on everything including the face just as an example here's my animation lots of keys kind of messy if I have everything selected I can deselect non key objects so anything that I didn't have keys on well technically I've just gotten rid of the ability to really have that because I just said a key on everything so but least like static objects will deselect anything in there that maybe had keys on it but those keys didn't move you know you you hit on a bunch of stuff and it just keeps keying at zero nothing ever changes that gets rid of that stuff so now everything left in the graph editor is something that matters it's something that actually moves and it's a lot easier for me to deal with my animation and you can see here it's actually physically deselected everything I don't have keys on which is really nice so I just don't have the clutter anymore there's one in here for frame current second and frame next second so what that does if I click it in your graph editor it just kind of cuts everything off for 24 frames or whatever your frame rates set to so that if you are blocking or more likely if you're polishing you don't look at the whole shot and get overwhelmed by all the curves you have you just look at one second of your animation at a time so this just lets you frame up on your graph editor instead of hitting the F key or the a key and seeing everything it just says frame the current second just let me see what I'm dealing with right now and you can then just say frame next second and then it'll move to the next chunk of time because since you can move the graph editor and squish it all around it gets a little hard sometimes when you're trying to learn timing just what this all means so by framing a second at a time this will get you used to seeing time in a visual way and if that sounds weird it just comes with experience so if that sounds useful to you there's some stuff for that set that to a hotkey somewhere on your keyboard you can just hit it and you have to be in this menu so let me grab everything again and we're back to having a bajillion key frames and keys and it's a mess I'm gonna come down to remove redundant keys what that's gonna do is get rid of any middle key frames that you would call like a hold when there's really nothing changing you don't need extra keys in there it's just gonna get rid of a lot of this mess so I'll click that button well give it a second and then here you can see it just clean up our curves significantly and reduce the amount of keys we had where we didn't need any this might take a while if you have a lot of stuff selected so just hang in there and let Maya do its thing but before after there's an entire section in here about toggling display and that's basically this like show menu so if you didn't want to see NURBS curves you could hide those something for your cinema4d users or there's some other software things maybe ZBrush - that kind of does the mari does this tumble around selection normally if I select the character's hips and then hit F right that's what I'm focused on that's the focus button now I rotate around the hips I can select I controller I'm still rotating around the hips at all times if you go to this little cube button the Autobots section and click tumble around selection that will change the behavior so that if I select the hips I rotate around the hips if I select the I control I now rotate around the I control this is not something I like but if this is something that you would want the ability to switch you can and that little drop out pop out area is a really good place to look for the mirror stuff the auto things anything were you like alt clicking on the mirror to turn on the auto mirror or alt clicking for that that X form relationship of the ball thing those kind of background processes that are running once you've all clicked you've enabled something you're not sure if it's on or off that's where these live oh okay this was a super long video before you go thank you for watching it I this I did took awhile thanks for hanging in there thanks for sticking with it I would appreciate it if you hit the like button if you did enjoy it this was helpful so that more people YouTube will recommend it and show it to more people also subscribe if you haven't already if you want to see more stuff like this and if you know someone else who uses enim BOTS or needs to be using an ax bar or Wii doesn't know how to use an ax bot please send in this video and convince them to watch as much of it as as they can stand because it took a while to make this and that it'd be nice but that's it thank you for watching if you want to talk to other animators about this tool about anything else in general we have a discord server down below that has over 3000 people in there ready to talk to you give feedback on your work all kinds of cool stuff the twitch community to ask me stuff live on stream and the patreon to get involved help support these videos help me make more of them more often and make them better etc ok I'm exhausted I've been filming for four hours hopefully what you're watching is a lot shorter than that but I've been sitting here for four hours filming this video god help me in editing heavily rescued a happy animating enjoy Anna bot and yeah link to everything down below see in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 55,078

Keywords: animbot, maya animbot, animbot animation, animbot tutorial, how to use animbot, how to animate in maya, maya scripts, maya animation tools, animate faster in maya, fast animation workflow, maya animation workflow, animation workflow tips, animation tools, character animation tools, tweenmachine, animation tween, animation graph editor help, maya graph editor, maya animation tutorial, best animation tool, tips for animators, animbot help, 3d animation tool, 3d animation, anim

Id: G49wexNmQ-Q

Length: 41min 43sec (2503 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020