Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Maya Animation Layers

I've just spend the last few days moaning at the Animation Layer setups and how poor the merge functionality is in Maya. We had a cutscene here that was 4000frms of baked MoCap, 3 animLayers, which took 40 minutes to merge on a 64bit beast of a machine. I can't understand why Autodesk are running the standard Bake command when it's so slow over large timelines.

Answer, by-pass it and use Trax. Ended up writing a function that would take all the nodes in each layer and generate a clip with the animData in it. So for the above case we end up with 3 clips. Now the Trax merge is FAST. The results meant that the same bake process going via this method went from 40 minutes, to 20 secs :)

And people diss Trax! It may be a little excentric, and lacking in features, but at least it's fast and clean.

3 comments:

  1. Can you expand on something you said once with animLayers have Mel access bugs?

    Is there a list of these bugs? I'm trying to mute an animLayer using a variable as my argument, and it's not having it.

    Is this one of those bugs?

    Thanks

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  2. hhm, not sure to be honest. We had all sorts of crash bugs in 2011. What are you trying to do/what calls are you making?

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  3. That's an awesome idea, i'm going to have to take a look at writing something similar, we have had the exact same problem for a while now. Thanks for putting it out there.

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