A quick overview of my new path animation tool for Maya.

Writing a new animation tool! Wouldn’t it be handy sometimes if you could visualize animation on any control on a character as a sphere and hide everything else in one click? And then just one other click to go back to the rig..

I have a new tool for Maya animators which is available here : https://gumroad.com/l/tSBDZ
Install and usage video here :

And a demo of it in use here while animating a quadruped :

I’ve been looking at various solutions for baking animation to world space while on my creature course, including my own tool for this that I wrote a few years back. I’m not crazy about any as most of them bake the animation to every frame which is a pain to clean up, or they use constraints which don’t always work with some rigs. So I re-worked my own version so that it only bakes the original frames each controller was keyed on and it doesn’t use constraints.

Still a WIP, I’ll be giving it plenty of testing over the next few weeks while I work on my assignments!

Over the last few years I’ve added several new features to my bhGhost tool – this video gives a quick overview of all current features and is intended as a quick start for anyone using it for the first time or anyone who has been using it for a while and wants to catch up on all of the latest features. The tool is available for download from my website here – graphite9.com/MayaDownloads.html

Stewart rig in the video is from Animation Mentor.

Hey Animators, I’ve added a small but useful update to my ‘Timeline Markers’ tool for Maya.

Recently I’ve been using this a lot while working on game animations with a lot of separate actions in the same Maya file and I found I wanted a quick way to set the timeslider to each animation range, so now if you hold CTRL while clicking on a marker it will set the timesliders Start range to that frame and if you hold ALT while clicking on a marker it will set the timesliders End range to that frame. It’s a very quick way to set things up for working on a section, or baking out to FBX etc. Hope it comes in handy!

Download it here

Tiny workflow improvement update for bhGhost – if a hide ghosts layer already exists in the Maya scene when you launch the tool the ‘Hide on Playback’ checkbox will be enabled to reflect that. NB This feature only works in Maya 2016 +.

Download it here