Maya Q&A - 5 Free Animation Plugins

hello it's taken a while but we're back with another Maya Q&A this week's question comes from Chris faux really like your recent videos what are some neat add-ons / scripts for Maya I saw you had advanced skeleton in your rigging tutorial AS is amazing well done on spotting the advanced skeleton icon on my maya shelf and for those who don't know advanced skeleton is a plugin for maya that allows you to quickly build a rig and animation controls for any 3d model that you could build I like this plug-in because it has a try before you buy type the feature to it which means that it's free to use for your personal work but when you start using it commercially the licensing starts at around seven hundred and fifty dollars and that got me thinking that there are other animators who've made videos on YouTube about their favorite plugins for animation in Maya and a big shout-out to sir weight and Harvey Newman we've got some awesome videos that I will link in the show notes below but a lot of these plugins do have a freemium site to them and a paid site to them as well so this week I wanted to make a video about five completely free plugins that you can use in your animation work disclaimer they're not the only animation plugins out there they might not be the best but they are completely free and more importantly they all are useful first we have tween machine the script has been around for a long time and is still available through github twin machine is a great way of getting out of the habit of letting mine choose where their spacing of your in-betweens goes thanks to this handy little slider we can choose whether we are favoring the previous pose or the next one now there are many ways of using tween machine as you can select individual controls to offset different parts of the body introducing some overlapping action as you go animating and you can even select single values in the channel box and tween machine will only interpolate that single value like raising the hand here in the Y axes only even though the poses that tween machine makes won't be perfect they are a great starting point to improve the spacing for your animations next we have BH ghost this is an awesome script where you can select your character's geometry and it will create an outline around the character there are many other scripts that make onion skinning or similar things here but BH ghost is really good because it's really responsive and also it creates an outline within the 3d viewport this is really good for designing your in-between poses because you can easily see which pose you want to favor and as you're working in 3d space you don't need to limit yourself to just working from a camera view but you can actually go around and check that the pose that you're making works within all three axes it's also great for cleaning up your shots as you can track the arcs across many different poses like seeing the path of action of this sword and it can be really useful for cleaning up animations at later stages the next plug-in is called studio library and pose libraries are really useful especially in large studios as you can save all types of information from poses for faces hands the full body and you can even save whole animations as well so it's really useful if you're designing cycles or many repetitive things that you can build a library up of characters poses this is a great way of speeding up your workflow because you can swap between different facial expressions at that click of a button and you can also blend between the different poses by selecting the pose and dragging with the middle mouse button you can mix in different emotions so I can make this smile seem a little more awkward by selecting specific controllers you can remix elements from different poses only on one section of the body so I can select all the brow controls and now I can actually make this smile look a little bit or nervous using a post library could be a great way to set down some quick initial poses and design your shot up very quickly however it's always important that you do have to add some customization to your poses as well and you should work on top of them as these saved poses should just be a base layer to start on your animation a tools has so many useful features that it could have its own video made just to explain every single one of them it has things like an improved tween machine and you can create custom selection buttons that allow you to pick any number of controllers and you can make a customized button to make it really easy to select controllers that are hard to get to or maybe you might want to group certain controllers together it's like the spine or the fingers that work well to have a single button to select all of them it also has a fantastic a line tool that lets you just select an object and choose a target and it will jump straight to it I might have to adjust the orientation of the sword but we can see it aligned instantly with the wrist control you can also create poses with no constraints by selecting the sword and the wrist controllers and using this tool that creates a temporary pivot on the wrist which allows me to easily pose the sword and both hands will move around with it this is really really really really cool and there's an excellent set of autosave and crash recovery tools inside a tools as well and this actually stops you from losing your work because if Maya crashes and you reload your scene a tools has saved the temporary file that will allow you to recover the work that you're actually lost there is a new version of this plug-in called annum bot which is a premium version with even more tools lastly we have the Animus cool picker this is a fantastic tool that even though it does have some restrictions for its usage it's widely used throughout the entire animation community a picker allows you to hide the NURBS kerb controllers and animate by selecting the controls on the picker interface this is great for clearly seeing your character with no visual obstructions and the picker is a customizable UI tool so you can create a picker for any character and use any combination of buttons that you want to make you can see that I can select and move Kayla's hands around from behind her body without even having to rotate the camera you can now build custom UI controls for the neck and the head by selecting the relevant controllers on your rig right clicking on the interface and choosing create new button buttons can be colored changed in size and labelled to make it easier to use and the interface is really quick and intuitive you can select multiple controls like the fingers and within seconds build an entire interface to control the hands it has loads of other features but check out the start up tutorials if you want to find more details just to let you know there's only gonna be a few more my Q&A is left for this year before I take a break for the Christmas holidays around mid-december so if you want to ask a question about how to learn more about Maya drop me a line in the comments section below remember to Like comment and subscribe and you can push the bell button to receive a notification of when I'm releasing my latest videos thank you all for watching and as always keep learning stay strong and I'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: yone santana

Views: 25,934

Keywords: Yone, Santana, yonesantana, yonesensei, Maya, Autodesk, 2019, UK, setup, 3D, How to, Beginner, Animation, scripts, plugin, addon, add-on, customize, workflow, free, five

Id: eEGFSoUL0sE

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019