Why Graph Editor is an Animator's HOLY GRAIL

if you ever meet an animator who tells you meh i don't really use the graph editor it's not really that important it's not necessary i just work the viewport it's fine don't be friends with that person run away from them because you could also say you know i like to drive but i don't really use the brake pedal you could drive with just the gas but it's not going to go very well for anybody involved [Music] we're going to pretend it's the exact same thing here because the graph editor is one of the most essential and useful tools in an animator's arsenal and most people aren't using it correctly they either don't know how to set it up right or they don't know how to really use it all that well and this video is not clickbait i'm going to show you seven specific things that are going to completely change the way you use the graph editor whether you're brand new to it this is going to set you up for success and if you've been using it for years i'm still probably going to show you some stuff you haven't seen before and last thing before we jump into it this video is sponsored by autodesk which is super cool and a lot of the things i'm going to show in this video are kind of reasons why we use maya over any other tool because the graph editor the one in maya actually has a lot of features that other tools don't yet have but two things i want to remind everybody of number one maya is free to all students and it's not some limited educational license a lot of people seem to think it might be it's not it's full maya it's the educational license which has a little pop-up telling people's education license but that's it it does everything you'd expect it to do and if like me you eventually get out of the education bubble and you no longer have access to it for free don't pay for the commercial version of maya they have maya indie my indie's like 290 bucks a year i've had it for a couple of years it's the same price as houdini it's less expensive than cinema 4d which has its whole bundle but a lot of people don't seem to realize that you don't have to pay for commercial maya you can just get maya indie and if you want to i'll put a link in the description it'll actually be a magic link so it's like an affiliate link so if you end up signing up for a my license is actually under commission off that so thank you for that but anyways enough talk let's jump into the graph editor [Music] i'll go into my graph editor found here for anybody who's new and this is what it looks like by default now if this is the first time you're ever really seeing someone working the graph editor i have a video that actually explains the beginner stuff so i'm going to just skip all of that and jump right to the tips now i don't know why this isn't a default but they fixed this in 2020. if you select a curve any curve zoom in and i'm just going to go ahead and hit s to set a key see how it messed up the curve shape right hitting s changes the spline now some people say oh but you can just right click and insert a key or some people will will hold i for the insert tool and then you can you can click and you can enter keys that way that's true you can totally do that but if you're just grabbing a curve and hitting s it shouldn't do this they fixed this around 2020 if you go up to the animation menu set you go to the key menu and go to set key that's the thing that's happening when you hit s go to the option box and enable set key preserves curve shape and then to save it just either hit set key reply if i just go over here and hit s it doesn't break the curve anymore i don't know why that's not the default behavior but there it is i'm gonna hope that a lot of you know this one but most people don't so let's talk about it this is not the only way to look at your curves in the graph editor and it's usually not the best way either because what often happens is that when you have all this stuff in the graph editor you may have one control maybe this character's running through space and he eventually gets all the way over here what ends up happening in the graph editor is that you have one control that goes really really really big on this graph and everything else you have to sit here zooming in and then you can't see it and you're like okay cool i'm gonna go ahead and hit a or f or something to re-expand it and then it condenses all your your main data down here and that's because we're in something called the absolute view which means that we have a set scale of numerical values right the whole graph being at zero here and then everything else goes wherever and everything's mapped to it but if you go to view you can actually see absolute stacked and normalized view or 1 2 and 3 in the graph editor absolute view is a normal graph everything is plotted where it would be based on its value over time if you hit the 2 or go to stacked view suddenly it gets rid of that numerical scale we no longer have a standard 0 for everything and then 100 for everything they're all just stacked on top of each other and the numbers don't matter anymore which makes it really nice to be able to see ah so when this hits here that's what this one's doing and you can now re-time stuff a lot easier seeing what curves are all doing together last thing is if you don't want them all stacked on top of each other but you do like having them kind of normalized that's what relative view is four or three on the keyboard normalized view will have everything go from the top to the bottom they'll all share the same space regardless of what normal values they actually take up it makes it much easier to work with your curves when you can just customize how you're viewing them in the graph editor most 3d software defaults to absolute view as well and some tools have a normalized view or a relative view whatever they call it but i have not seen any other 3d tool that has a stacked view which to me is an essential tool one of the main reasons i love working in maya especially when it comes to doing cycles this is really helpful we'll talk about that another time though next up is weighted tangents i'm going to show you a quick little demo of something that a pixar animator once showed me and it totally blew my mind and changed the way i work to this day weighted tangents are not the default in maya but i encourage everybody watching to try them out if you haven't before non-weighted tangents are these little diamond icons that normally just let you move them back and forth and you can go to any curve and change which type of tangent it is on a curve by curve basis but my recommendation is to just go to your animation preferences go to the animation tab and change it here so that it's just the way you want it for everything if i switch this to weighted tangent hit save any objects that are already existing in the scene don't have that applied to them yet so i'll just go ahead and grab these now and switch them but anything in the future will now just default to the little square handles this allows me to both rotate it like normal but also to expand the weight or influence of this key over its interpolation to adjacent keyframes i'll do a quick bouncing ball and just show you why weighted tangents are so powerful if i leave this as a non-weighted tangent thing i'll show you what we've all done before take your little handles and we've all done this where we take this and we break it you can right click and break that way and then you point these and i when i was a student used to spend so much time i had to zoom in and i'd make sure i was pixel perfect to make sure this is exactly lined up with the thing which is funny because that's wrong for several reasons but anyways but what that gives us is a very mechanical ball bounce that has a very sharp arc no hang time so if we say oh well we want to add hang time we want this to bounce up a little bit a little bit quicker you know take this i'll just set that to auto come over here set a key move it up but then i got to go back in here i got to readjust these things again which again these are not actually going to be accurate to what they need to be but i'm just doing what we've all done this process should not be shocking to anybody but there we go there's our bouncing ball but then you get the note that says hey can you make that ball bounce lower or higher or whatever take all these i'll move them down like oop if it's bouncing lower i've got to fix all of this right i'm not going to you get the point i'll go really high same thing i'm going to need to point these and reorient them non-weighted tangents are not particularly good at these kinds of things because you have to not only continue to maintain the direction that these are pointing but you also have to add a lot of keys to do things like hang time now with this curve back to default and set to weighted tangents i'll show you how it's better if i take this and instead of trying to point it i'll just hold shift so it doesn't start rotating i'll just hold shift and go whoop and just get rid of those and then this one also condenses it to nothing and sometimes you'll notice that if you have a tangent that's uneven maybe it's longer on one side than the other you can't actually condense it past the shorter side and so in this case i might break it just to shrink it down what i've done here is i've negated the weight of these keys meaning that those points in time those keyframes have no influence over the interpolation of the curves in and out of them so now all i have to do is extend the weight or the influence of the top key to create that hang time there's more weight on the top and so the top has more control and weight over the rest of the curve does that make sense so now i've created a bouncing ball in a fraction of the time and with way more control because now if i say oh you know what this needs to go much much much higher i don't have to adjust jack i need to go way lower doesn't matter because these have no say over the curve these things have all the weight it doesn't matter what the values are the ratio of what's important is the same regardless and so the trick is that with weighted tangents you change the weight you never ever need to change the direction you might just get rid of one side if you if that's important and you need to have that happen but you never need to start pointing them in different directions so this is a faster workflow a cleaner workflow because less keys and a more procedural workflow in terms of the interpolation overall would recommend if you haven't tried this before give it a shot try it for a week see what you think the next tip is a little bit more basic but no less important i made a car analogy earlier in the video but maya is like a car and that you don't just get in and drive you adjust your seat you adjust the height of things you mess with your mirrors maya is a very complex tool it can do a lot of things and it's not usually ready for most people to just start working right out the gate i mean it is but you want to get comfortable you want to make sure that it's actually efficient for you personally in your workflow to use now there's a ton of stuff we could talk about in terms of settings and adjustments and things that i recommend changing but just to point it out maya has a really strong hotkey editor i think it's got one of the best hotkey editors i've ever seen in any tool 3d software or not because when you open it you can see what's mapped on what keys and if you hold control and shift and alt or just whatever you can see what's in use which i really like you can also set your presets and things like that you can put custom scripts in here and link that to key presses i'm not gonna do a whole tutorial on this one topic right now but what i wanted to point out is that things like breaking your tangent handles or setting something to auto tangent or buffer curves or whatever you can set all of that as hotkeys and then you can put all of that into a stream deck or something on your desk that does hotkeys i have a whole video coming out where i'm doing a desk tour set up for what i'm currently using in case you're interested in that make sure you're subscribed and while you're at it hit the like button if you're enjoying this video if it's helping you out so far hit the thumbs up makes a big difference and subscribe if you haven't already it's free you can always change your mind thank you [Music] the next three all go hand in hand they are the big visual changes to the graph editor that make it so much more useful now i used to use the graph editor like this i'd have this panel here and all my stuff and you know whatever view i'm looking through this is what i normally would be looking at but we've all been here where we're looking for a specific curve or specific thing or attribute and it's kind of lost right now cool thing is if you go to stacked view they're all actually in order so this translate x is going to be the top thing so if i go to translate x you can see here it's selected this one underneath is rotate z that's just because the other ones don't have values on them so this is going to be the translate x and so on but this window on the left is pretty useful in terms of knowing what's what if i select this i can see what it is i can also filter by this right so i used to do this all the time where i'd say i just want to see that one but then how many times have you done this where you go here and you grab all your translates and you're scrolling you know and you just filtering and i'm going to go ahead and stop doing this but you get the point you grab all the things and it filters them all right we've all done that especially like even just like the pendulum assignment and then you make a change and you you know perpetuate that change across a bunch of different curves and maybe you offset a bunch of stuff and you're like yeah this is great and you realize oh shoot i forgot one i have to undo and do all that over again and you know because it only grabs the translate x's that you clicked on let me just rock your world real quick what i'm going to do is you can go to the channels and you can do it with these two here but what i'm actually going to do is go into my animation preferences or the man running from the gear of death and in this time slider category you're going to see the same options here under channel box sync what i'd like you to do is select both of these deselect them both then reselect them both and hit save if you are doing it from here you're going to need to select them unselect them and then reselect them there's a little bit of a bug it's been there for a couple of years and it seems to still be there where you might turn them both on and it may not work so turn them both off then turn back on again because it actually makes them work but now check this out if i'm like oh cool i want all the translate x's just click on the word translate x on the side here boop and it does it for all of them i freaked out when i found that out because there you go that's all of your translate x's they're all selected every single one you have to worry about it you can go translate y you can grab them by multiples and it's just going to grab every single one for everything you have selected the other thing that's cool about that is if you select say the head in this case you can see that i have a bunch of keys on rotate z but i don't have keys on anything else if i click rotate z you'll see my timeline shows all the stuff but i gotta rotate x my timeline is devoid of keys now because there are no keys to show so it actually syncs your channel box your graph editor and your timeline in terms of where you see keys and what keys you see so that's these little options but we're gonna keep going because one thing i want to get you comfortable with the idea of is getting rid of this sidebar i used to love this sidebar like i said i used to use it for all kinds of stuff now i collapse it i don't work with it anymore but in order to do that we have to fix a few more things because what this is good for is first of all filtering by different channels check we got that but the next thing is if you have a bunch of stuff on screen here and you're like ah but you know which one is this i see there's a green one there's gonna be something involving y you may select it and then you scroll through and you're like ah here it is here's the little green square that's for this control the upper arm f k right but what if i didn't need to be scrolling through looking for a square just go to view curve name and go active only what that will do is anytime i select a curve it will tell me the name of that curve in the graph editor so if i say what's this one ah the head control rotate z that is so much easier faster and more efficient than me sitting here trying to scroll and say ah here you are rotate z and then i gotta reframe it right you could set it to always but i would not recommend it it's just gonna give a ton of visual noise so curve name active only go ahead and turn that on and if you select multiple things it'll tell you what they are with those settings turned on you can now collapse this without worrying about missing anything that saves you a lot of screen space especially if you're working on a laptop but there's one more thing and this is one of the best things that i ever did in the graph editor it's recommended to me by daniel klug who at the time used to work at disney this is a change that i found some people are a little nervous to do but don't be and that's the thing you can reset everything i've showed you in this video very easily so try all of these things and see if you miss what you had before now the main problem we're about to solve is if you select a bunch of controls and you look at the graph editor it's a whole lot of red blue and green and if you have other controls like the foot that has a bunch of these like leg twists foot rolls most of those are gray your standard attributes are all these same three colors and so you never know if a translate or a rotate x is going to look a certain way because they all just look red let's change that if you go to edit set curve colors well actually i'm going to leave this footage in i've done this a few times and i'm like oh i think there's a button for it and i try to show it to people and i click that and every single time i go oh that's not what i wanted to happen i've just made everything pink and it's actually kind of hard to get it to not be pink anymore so don't do what i just did i'm going to leave this in here so that i can tell you don't do this how i actually set this up is to go to windows settings and preferences color settings this is where you can go to 3d views and that's actually how i change my my background and but if you go down to graph editor this is where you can change your colors for your graph editor so translate x y and z i leave the way they were i just add a little bit of saturation i like to be really bright and vibrant rotate i just change the hues a little bit so instead of red i go orange for x y just becomes yellow instead of green and then rotate z i make it cyan instead of the darker blue and then for scale i either just kind of do this scale of like bright to muted pink or i might go like pink blurple and like violet but then if you go to a really dark violet like i've done before like i used to do it like this it gets really hard to see in the graph editor so i stopped doing that i now do it this way i don't use scale as often so they're not as important to me and i do this because now when i select my curves and i jump to any normal view it is a big mess of spaghetti but now it's a lot easier to decipher because instead of three colors for everything i now know that if i'm looking for a rotate x this could be it this could also be it this is a rotate x this is rotate x it's a little bit more information that maya is giving me right out the gate and i can select them all see the names and easily filter through what i'm looking for if i know i'm looking for a rotate y it's going to be yellow and it takes about a week to get used to that but once you have this is no longer necessary you get everything you need easily filterable and searchable by clicking a thing seeing its name and just like that the graph editor has become so much more powerful and so much more useful as it helps you instead of hinders you to do the work you're trying to do so whether it's setting keys and not having it mess up your splines if you're adjusting the way you view things you're messing with tangent weights you're putting shortcuts you're doing the selection sync names colors these are all things that once you have them set you can pretty much just leave them that way and work a lot more efficiently but please let me know in the comments if anything in here was brand new to you if there's anything in here that's totally changed your view of the graph editor or the way you're going to work things like that i'm super curious to hear your thoughts and once again a big thank you to autodesk for sponsoring this video if you want to check out maya indie i'll put a link down below and if you're a student don't bother buying it just get it for free because you can so why not anyways thanks so much for watching hit the thumbs up if you enjoyed this subscribe if you haven't already i'm suede and i'll see you in the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 37,419

Keywords: maya graph editor, maya graph editor tips, graph editor animation, how to animate in graph editor, how to use graph editor, what is graph editor, graph editor, dope sheet, blender, blender graph editor, blender dope sheet, maya tips, animation graph editor, animation splines, how to spline, graph editor tutorial, character animation tutorial, animation tips, character animator, character animation, character animation software, animation workflow, graph editor workflow, anim

Id: TMSpauVphNs

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022