Introducing Motion Trail Manager - Animation Tool

#1

I sat down a few days ago and gave Maya 2012’s new Editable Motion Paths a whirl. It is a great new feature, but I felt it was lacking something that could make it significantly better… management.

So over the weekend I took a break from my other tool RetopoG and started working on something a little different. Motion Trail Manager is a fast an easy way to organize your paths into groups(characters) and then colors, helping to put one more nail in that “Graph Editor” coffin for all translations.

So far the hardest parts to program are over, but there is still some work done. When it is ready, all current RetopoG Beta testers will receive it in the next update. Pricing has yet to be determined, but I am currently considering packing the two in together. The plan is still to keep the cost reasonable, you’ll just get more for your dollar now :).

#2

Been adding a whole lot more Motion Trail functionality ontop of the group management. With the tool you’ll get expanded options for controlling tangents that go well beyond what is provided in Maya 2012 UI for motion trails:

Most of these controls would otherwise only be accessible through the Graph Editor and do not carry over correctly to the Motion Trails. I have fixed all that so you can apply all these tangent options directly to the curve keyframes.

In short, this means you never have to use the Graph Editor again to adjust translate curves in any fashion. :buttrock:

#3

Sounds interesting. For me a disappointment in the implementation of Motion Trails in Maya 2012 is that you can’t use the scale tool on them, so for example if your characters foot is swinging forward during a walkcycle and you are happy with the Z translation but want to foot to pick up higher as it swings forward it’s still easier to scale the Y curve in the graph editor instead. This is something that the motion trails in Cinema 4D allow you to do.

Cheers,
Brian

#4

Hmm I think that can be solved with a daggercontext tool, scalekey command, and retrieving the TranslateZ Curve point from the Motion path point. I’ll see what I can do, but I’ve got a lot on my plate now with RetopoG Beta testing and this so it may have to wait. :slight_smile:

Of course it would be much better if the Scale tool just worked but whatever.

#6

Absolutely, but the way it works in C4D is handy when you already have a lot of keys in there and want to adjust them together. There are things I prefer about the Maya 2012 motion trails, (the C4D ones don’t have adjustable pre/post frame options for a start, they always show the entire preview range which is less than ideal IMO) but I still think it’s a pretty cool trick that C4D can do this.

Here’s a quick video to show what I mean. For this video I’ve switched to Cinemas ‘animation tool’ so when I scale or rotate I’m not effecting the cube, just it’s animation. For something like animating a spiders walk for instance it can be a nice way to work.

Cheers,
Brian

#7

BoostAbuse About the tangents window, just tried it, you are right. Good to know.

I’ll definitely be leaving these in though because the graph editor has to be open to have access to the tangents window. That and I can change to Stepped on a per frame basis directly from the motion curve.

#10

Thanks for checking it out. I think it’s a cool feature too, but one big limitation with it in C4D is that it always affects the entire range of the animation, so you can’t just scale selected keys. So in practical use it’s really only useful for tweaking short animation cycles and that kind of thing. *great for spider-cycles though ; )

What would be really cool would be a feature like this that would only effect a selected range of the motion trail.  Soft selection would be awesome too, particularly for mocap indeed.

Cheers,
Brian
#11

I definitely like the idea of soft-selection translating and possibly scaling for motion curves.

#12

When do you expect for both retopoG and MTManager to see the day of light ?
Are they pure mel scripts or plugins ? (I am asking as the fact that one has to update .mlls each time maya updates makes such a solution quite difficult)
What about price ?

#13

Well, that all depends on a number of things. First the RetopoG Beta has several bugs I want to at least try to fix before a release. The Beta testing is set to end August 30th, but I may extend that if necessary. I also need to figure out a way to get the beta key retrieval online so you can instantly start using it after the purchase. Currently I create and send keys manually with the beta.

Everything will be distributed as .pyc files (compiled python scripts), which from what I can tell work with both Maya 2011 and 2012 without re-compiling. There is a chance that say Maya 2013 could break this, as pyc files are suppose to be python version dependent. If 2012 & 2011 are anything to go by however, it probably will not be an issue.

Pricing wise, I am not going to sell these at a premium price. Expect it to be on the lower end as far as retopology tools go. RetopoG will likely contain one or two bugs that are more or less issues inside of Maya, but still, it would be unfair to charge more for something I know is not perfect. That and I want to keep the price reasonable because ultimately I want more people using these tools.

Part of my reasoning for packing in the Motion Trial Manager is I still want this to be an excellent deal even if RetopoG is not 100% perfect for the first version.

#14

Just fixed this issue as well.

The motion trail Start and End times now adjust on the fly to match the pre and post display frames. This means no more significant slowdown with motion curves. That is if your display frames are reasonable like say 24 pre and 24 post.

The only downside is playback can get a little slow because it is trying to update the information based on your current frame. Hopefully I can make a solution for that too.

#15

I was just wondering If there is something like this.
In Maya 2012 you can’t brake tangets in viewport, and that irritating bug in graph when I can’t see all curves even with hotfix 2.
Nice job. :thumbsup:

#16

Completely fixed. There is now a curve quality slider where you can decide how smooth or how fast you want a curve. The curve quality adjusts to the time-frame making the fastest playback or visibility possible. No more need to constantly dial in values when you change your timeframe.

There is a big surprise on the horizon as well. The tool will not only improve the Motion Trail workflow, but (hopefully) also introduce a brand new animation tool that to my knowledge has never been in a 3D package before. In my opinion it is just as useful as motion trails themselves, maybe even more so. I know, it’s a bold claim, but I am really excited for this one. Ultimately whether or not it makes the cut however depends on a few bugs.

#17

Good news. I have added the dragger tool now that essentially allows you to do the same thing. :bounce:

Far more exciting though, that brand new tool I hinted at in the last post is now 100% functional. I’m not quite ready to spill the beans yet, but I’ll just say the reception has been very enthusiastic so far from the few who have seen it.

#18

Very interested to use your tool Chris, looks like a great addition to my animation toolkit. Will there be a test version or a beta to be able to try it out?

#19

There will be a Beta very soon. It will be a part of the same Beta as my other tool RetopoG, that has been going on for some time now.

The tool itself is just about ready, just needs to be setup to use the same registration system. That said, I have a lot left to do for the documentation. Some of the tool’s features need some good explanation.

#20

Sounds interesting, I’d be pretty keen to beta test the motion path tool if possible.

Cheers,
Brian