Tuesday, August 23, 2011

AM Tutoring Tips and Tricks part 12 - Borrowing keys

While making moving holds, borrowing keys saves a lot of time. Moving holds are not only to keep the character alive, but also give time for the poses to be read by the audience.

A pose can not be read in only one frame. Even in a fast movement, it needs to be given at least 2 frames. A pose will be read in the graph editor like the picture below:
Since we need at least 2 frames for a pose to read, moving holds are required to avoid dead pixels and to keep the character alive. Borrowing keys is the most efficient way of creating moving holds to me .

How do you borrow keys in Maya technically? Move the timeline to the frame where you would like to borrow from (it doesn't need to be a key), middle mouse drag it to where the pose starts, and set a key.

Here is an example of how borrowing keys works. Let's start with a simple ball moving from screen left to right in 24 frames, flat tangents on both sides.
I'd like to make a moving hold for the ending pose (f24), so I'm going to borrow the pose from f22 for f12.
After a quick adjustment of smoothing the curve, the pose is easily read because of the moving hold.

There are still a few adjustment needed after borrowing keys, but it will quickly give you a moving hold .

This is a simple demo for introducing the idea of borrowing keys, when animating a full body rig, more tweaks/adjustments will be needed.

Article created by Erik Lee, refined by Joseph Taylor.

No comments: