Maya Viewport 2.0 for Animators

Animator, Tim Kallok offers a short overview for how to make the most out of Maya Viewport 2.0 for animation. If you are an animator, the faster you can get viewport interaction means less play-blasts and a more streamlined workflow.

Here is a demo for how to use Maya’s Viewport 2.0 to get better animation playback speed

If you are using newer versions of Maya, Viewport 2.0 is now the default setting for Maya views and is an extremely capable display for working, largely beating out the older Maya viewport by a long shot.

Tim shows how to best utilize Maya Viewport 2.0 in your own animation workflow using vertex caching. This will allow you to see realtime playback using Maya Viewport 2.0, when you apply and change a few settings in Maya 2015 Service Pack 4.

Vertex caching with Maya Viewport 2.0 has inherent advantages over play-blasting a scene, in that once you have cached frames, you can see the animation from any angle.

 

MAya-Viewport-2.0-settings-for-Animation-Playback

 

Maya Viewport 2.0, Generating Caches Faster

If you have your playback settings set for realtime playback at your designated frame rate, Maya will take a few passes of playing through the animation to create the cache. At times, you will need to play the scene back 4 or 5 times for it to “catch” all the frames in the caching system.

Tim has created a little script that will allow you to change that. With a bit of MEL, you can have Maya playback the first time using the “play every frame” setting which will force every frame to be cached to disk. Then the script switches the playback setting back to “play realtime”.

int $rangeStartFrame = `playbackOptions -q -min`;

currentTime -e $rangeStartFrame;
playbackOptions -playbackSpeed 0 -loop “once” -by 1;
playButtonForward;
playbackOptions -playbackSpeed 1 -loop “continuous”;