If you animate in Maya, you probably are already familiar with Brian Horgan’s animation assisting tool. bhGhost offers an interesting approach to onion skinning animation right in the Maya viewport. The tool will create a ghosted outline of your character that gets left behind so you can easily see the strength of your poses and arcs for your character.
A while back, bhGhost added the ability to easily alter the color of each ghost outline, which makes it easier to see breakdowns or key poses, or highlight a certain outline for the character.
Simplifying things a bit further, the latest bhGhost release will allow you to use Maya’s Quick Select Sets to only outline certain parts of a character. This will make it easier to focus on certain parts of the animation and will make the viewport less cluttered and more efficient.
Adding a new ghosted outline for the entire character when you are only concerned with the hand lets say, can get really cluttered quickly. Also, the more ghosted outlines you have in the viewport, the more taxing it will be on your system.
The new feature will increase legibility and be a much more efficient way to highlight and target the area of the animation you need.
bhGhost is still a free tool, and can be found on Brian’s site. Check out the latest release bhGhost for Maya here.
