How to make a scene IN MAYA … quite literally

As my second assignment, I chose the Game Cycle poses. Before starting animating, I most definitely needed to do some math first. Being the original setup at 30 fps (frames per second), the assignment requiring at least 8 seconds per animation and having to create 4 different animations, each of them required 240 frames with a 10-frame transition after each one, I ended up with a total of 990 frames.

python : because notes don’t write themselves . . . sadly!

As soon as the frame range for each animation was set , I needed to add on-screen annotations visible in the viewport as my reference, and the most straightforward way to achieve this is via code. There was an issue. Every time I opened my project, the notes kept disappearing, so I had to make sure that Maya set the data in its system and updated the HUD every time the project was loaded to have the notes visible at all times:

studio library : strike a pose

The character I used for this project was initially rigged in T-Pose.

What I needed to do next was to save all the main poses in their specific folder using studio library. First, I had to make sure that the poligons were not selected during this process and even if they were already originally disabled, as a further precaution, I added the mesh to a new layer so I could toggle its visibility and disable its selection using it only as a reference. When saving a pose, is was of the utmost importance to select every controller and controllers only. Once saved the T-Pose, the next step was to create a mirror table, fundamental if you want to use the mirror tool for other poses later (otherwise is going to be all over the place and it won't work, learnt the hard way) and making sure to set it on 'swap' to have the whole character's pose mirrored and not only some parts (left to right). Having everything in place, I could start to work at the following poses. They were 'Idle', 'Run','Jump' and 'Dodge'. My character is a boxer so I chose the 'guard' position for my idle and had it gently swing from side to side and in place. For the 'Run' animation, I used a standard animation to start and I enhanced the movement accordingly.