Question What is the best way to organize large numbers of Maya animations?

Hi,

I have learned how to create the types of animations I want to create in Maya, but it's quite cumbersome to organize, especially when there are a lot of transitions.

For example, say I created some jumping animations. Then say I created some ground animations and some ledge climbing animations. I then need to be able to transition from jump both to grounded and climbing. That means I will be using the same pose as the start for both of these transitions.

What I have been doing is literally copying and pasting the keyframes. But say then I want to change the jump animation, I then copy and paste this pose again. In some cases though, I have had animations in different project files and I have had to do this complicated process of importing through the Time Editor and then baking and correcting any errors.

This feels wrong. Do professional animators usually keep all animations in one project file? And if so, are there any particular techniques for managing these types of scenarios because in a big game jump may transition into many many different states?

 

Hey!
So the way that you want to do things is in your animation program (Maya, Blender etc.) you want to make individual animation clips (by baking them to the skeleton), export an FBX and import them into Unity (BTW, you only need the skeleton with no mesh, no rigging). Build a library of all of your INDIVIDUAL clips in a directory in Unity. Some animators think its a good idea to have all the animations in a single FBX file and then cut it up in Unity, but then if you want to change a single animation clip you have to go through the entire setup process for all the clips again. Just keep them separate.

Now as far as your transitions go, it isn't really necessary to have your character's body pose aligned at the start of one pose to the end of the last. Unity allows you to blend your clips into one another. You don't need to manage that in Maya, Unity will do it for you. If you are using the Mecanim system you just setup your blend in your transition to soften the transition. You may have to occasionally tweak a few frames of animation to get them to line up better, but for the most part the blend works fine without a great deal of preplanning.

 

This would be okay for simpler animations, but the project I am working on is more complicated than this and it really does look a lot better (and functions better) if the end poses on the animations line up correctly, especially since I'm also using root motion. It needs to be accurate. Blending the root motion, even with target matching, can cause it to be a little off. I use blending for some cases (e.g. run -> run stop), but some other cases do need to be lined up.

I have seen animation sets where the poses line up perfectly, so the animators must be doing something to not make their life miserable.