Brent Forrest presents a quick tip tutorial covering creating inbetweens or breakdowns in Maya – looking at three different methods for speeding up creating breakdown poses or inbetweens in Maya.
3 ways to speed up inbetweens in Maya. file under H.A.M for Hotkeys, Animaiton and MEL.
Everyone has their own method and workflow for creating animation and what works for some may not work other animators. Most animators will work with stepped tangents, which is an easier way to see through the poses right to the timing for the animation.
In Brent’s case, he likes to work with stepped tangents, have is poses behave like drawings, and avoid setting splines until the very end.
In creating an arbitrary inbetweens or breakdown between poses, the method would be to switch from stepped to linear tangents, and then slice a keyframe through the linear tangent curve. The problem is that this sequence of settings takes a bit of time to set up each time.
Brent shows how you can automate the process by using a bit of MEL, and applying it to a hotkey in Maya that will allow you to run the script from a keystroke.
Brent also shows how you can get interactive controls for you inbetweens using the bTweener script. The script offers weighted control of the inbetweens based off of your two bookending poses.
If you want a more in-depth look at using the bTweener script for quickly creating breakdowns, Brent covered the workflow in a post called Speed up character animation breakdowns in Maya.
