 Welcome back to the workflow clip. Today's part two of how to be a fast animator. And today it's the Maya edition. Why Maya edition? Just because part one over there was about preparing in a way and things you should do almost before you animate, while you animate afterwards. It's more kind of a workflow habit type of thing. So like planning, taking proper notes, stuff like that. But that is also like if someone asks, I want to get six pack abs. How do I do this? And they expect some specific exercise and that's it. And they can keep eating pizza and look at myself. And the answer is always, well, you got to change your nutrition. And that's kind of the way I'm approaching this now. It's like, well, I don't want to do all the planning. I don't want to test my rig. I don't want to shoot reference. I just want to animate and be fast while I animate. So, OK, well, today is all about that. I'm still assuming that you looked at part one and you did all those things like testing your rigs and planning and putting reference and all that stuff. Really important. Well, let's pretend you did all of this and you are actually animating in Maya. You got the scene open. What can you do to make the workflow faster? And today I'm going to talk about types that are immediately applicable within Maya. I'm not going to talk about tools just yet, just because you might not have those tools. You might be at a company where they don't have those tools. You can't afford those tools. What can you do within just the Maya that you have? Of course, there are versions and there are different things about that. But you open Maya. What can you do to speed up your scene so that you can animate faster? That's what we're going to do today. So let's check it out. So let's check out the scene. This is what I'm currently animating and it's actually a great example of also what not to do. It's a very messy scene. I have a bunch of stuff that I didn't name. I have nothing referenced. There's a bunch of stuff I should change, but that is, I can't wait to talk about this scene and from beginning to the end, like what I did and what I did wrong and all that good stuff. But here's what I have here. This is the full scene. You can see how it's a bit stuttery. It's not super smooth. That's potentially what you have in your shop. So let's pretend I actually have a reference. So I brought in a reference. This is my stormtrooper here and you can see there's a massive, massive scale difference. Again, something that affected my renders. Oh, so what I want to talk about. All right, so let's pretend this is your scene and you have a bunch of assets that are referenced like that. It's that little blue extra thing that shows you it is referenced. So if you have one character and that's what you want to focus on, let's pretend you have a bunch of other characters within your scene. Take your characters and unreference them. You can do a right click, reference, unload file and gone. You can also go file, reference editor and in here you can turn it on and off. As you can see, I got no references in here. So that'll be tip number one. On reference, everything you don't need. So right now I only have this scene and this is what I need. That being said, I can play this. Again, it's not super smooth. I can go through my camera. And one thing you'll see, the character is fairly smooth looking just because if I select the character here and I hit one, now he's rougher. So this is three, this is one. So now you can see the scene is already faster. Now I'm screen grabbing this. You're not gonna have the exact thing that I'm seeing right now, but it is for me, I can already tell it's faster. Something else that will help you too is to actually get rid of more. I have the set here. You can see that table is breaking. If I go into this other view, there's a bunch of stuff in my scene that's gonna make the whole thing slower. So I would hide this, hide that, hide this, hide everything you don't need. I have this all grouped so I can hide all of this. And again, you look at what's going on right now. It's already faster. Now if you're hiding everything, obviously you can see that there is no ground. So foot contact might be a problem if that's something you need to take care of in your scene. So just create, poly, plane, and I can extend this and bring it down. Of course you make it work so that it's actually where the feet are touching, but that just creates some temporary set pieces in case you have a wall, stairs, a ground or something that gives you a rough representation of what you need to see. Again, I have R2 in here, take him, and this is part of my problem with the render thing. I had to duplicate everything. It's a long story. But I can take R2, hide everything. I have Grogu in the back, let's hide him, and I have BBA, let's hide him as well. What else is left? I got a bunch of stuff. Oh, I got some fake liquid here in the back. But again, you play this, it's getting better and better. Something else that will help is actually to unload your audio. So I'm gonna go, you can't see it here, but I'm gonna say audio off. And a lot of times that helps me as well. Again, as you're watching this, potentially you might not see it because of the screen grab and YouTube upload. But trust me, I can scrub through this and it is buttery smooth. Now, sometimes you might have a scene that you do wanna see things where you add the lights. You potentially add shadows, ambient occlusion, and you want the whole thing anti-aliased. Don't do that. If I play this now, oof. All right. It's not too bad, but I feel that it's definitely slower than before. Sometimes you wanna see it. You wanna, especially when you do a play blast, obviously you wanna turn certain things off, especially the anti-aliased to present things. But when you animate, don't do this. Now this rig is very fast. I can probably still use it, but generally I don't have it and I turn all of those things off. Textures sometimes depends on what you wanna see. But if again, if that doesn't work and textures are no good, turn them off. Now if you have other things in the scene, and I'm just gonna turn everything back on so you can see what's going on here, you can also go into shading, use default material, and that will take everything off. So now again, I can scrub and you can see it is buttery smooth. It's really nice. Now let's pretend you have multiple characters and you just wanna concentrate on one, but you still wanna see what else is there. What you could do is grab your character. So if the whole character is selected, you go to cache, alembic, cache, expert selection to alembic. And then you can name this. Don Alembic, it's very boring. Say yes. And it's gonna go through the whole scene one by one here for my frame. This is gonna be very slow-ish. So I'm gonna pause the recording. Okay, on pause, it's finished. So let's say I'm gonna hide this character. I'm actually gonna hide even more. Now just have the lights here in there. Whoop, PBA. You play this again, this is very, very smooth. So what you can do now, you can go file, import, navigate to your alembic directory, grab this guy, open, and there he is. Now you can see it also took all of this. So obviously you can go in there and hide all of that. And of course, my expert selection was very basic. You can tweak the settings when you export. But there you go. I got the character in there. So if you have this with other characters, that will definitely be of help. So you can still see what's going on with other characters you animated. So you have one main character with controllers. The other ones are there for reference. This character also has the display mode and display type. So you have a template, you got a reference here that's in terms of selection. You have modes here with proxy. So when you move this around, it is really fast. It's even faster. This is just blazingly fast. So if you have a rig that has that option, of course that's awesome. You can switch it to normal, texture, and render. So again, if you have a proxy model that's cut up like this, absolutely fantastic. This is gonna be so fast. Now let's pretend you don't have this. What you can do is just create a sphere, take your head controller, take this, point, and orient, take your sphere, make it a bit bigger, move it where it needs to be. Of course, now I messed up my constraints, but that's okay. And I can also use a parent constraint if I want. So if you take all of this, pretend I'm gonna hide the geometry here that's on my layer. Hide this, you of course name it. But you can put a sphere for your head, a sphere for the chest, for the hips. Now when you play, it's still super fast. So if your rig doesn't have a proxy mode, absolutely put in the helper object and you can put this for head, chest, and maybe cubes for the feet. You can do legs or whatever you wanna do, how detailed you wanna be. But that is absolutely a way to go. And usually when I animate, not usually, but sometimes I grab my sphere and I just animate a bouncing ball in a way. I move the sphere around pretending that this is the character to kind of map out the timing. And when I'm done, I bring it back and I put the rig in and then I take the rig and match the position of what the sphere was doing. This could be just the heads, the root, whatever it is. But again, super fast. Go through the camera view and it gives you a good indication of where your character is going to be. Now, something else that I have that is also built in my are hotkeys. So if I have something like this, I don't wanna go into here, go here, and then, well, I wanna grab, let's say, this guy. You can go back in here with my hotkey, I have NURBS on, off. That used to be a special script, but now if you go into Windows, Settings, Hotkey Editor, you have a bunch of stuff already set up where you don't have to do any custom scripts. I still have some of these for the channel keys. The Outliner collapsing, so let's pretend I have a bunch of stuff open. Let's open all of this here. Maybe you don't wanna just go through all of these separately with my hotkey, so let's reopen all of this here. I can just hit O and it collapses everything. Stuff like that is really helpful. Actually, I don't even know what that is. That is not something that I usually have. I don't know what that is. So I have hotkeys to frame forward and back for NURBS on, off. Undo for me is U and not CTRL Z. Everything is within my reach when I put my hand on the keyboard. Also, I'm left-handed, I don't know if that makes a difference, but that's what I have here, as well as zooming in. So I can hit my hotkey and it goes into my zoom mode. That's the 2D pan and zoom. And then under hotkey activates it here and now it can go around the scene like this and also switch over to zoom and zoom in and out. And that is super useful. I would definitely use the 2D zoom and pan tool. Now that being said, if you have a newer version of Maya, you can also go into your preferences and there's cash playback. I have it off just because my scene is already so light, I don't need it. It's also really long. So when you put on cash playback, I have found that sometimes you have a really long scene, it takes a while. It just takes a long time to work this out. Also, when you have really slower rigs, it takes even longer to create that cash playback setup here. But again, tons of options. So customize this if you have a version. I'm in 22 right now, Maya 2022. I also use Maya 20 as well. So whatever Maya you use, you might have or might not have certain options. Now there's a lot more you can do. I love the Zoo Tools Pro. There's a bunch of stuff in here that's super helpful in terms of just shaders, lights, camera setup, especially randomized keyframes. And I use this a bunch for handheld camera stuff. But again, tools will be in a part three or four or in the future, there's a lot to cover. And no, I don't have animbot just yet and I'm gonna use that as well. So a lot of tools that I'm gonna cover including Zoo Tools Pro and other ones that I have. There we go. These are the tips. Hopefully it will help you to be combining that plus part one with your preparation and your planning and all of that. Plus future parts when you talk about specific tools where you can animate even faster. But it's more of a different workflow thing. I think you're gonna be on the right track to be really fast. And as always, if you have other tips, other things you want me to add, comments are open, you can always let me know. And stay tuned for the future parts. It's gonna be things like you don't want to use all the controllers and all the blame chips, whatever you have when you rig, just use the smallest minimal amount of controllers to get the maximum amount of information on the screen. So it's stuff like that about workflows and tools. There's more to talk about. There are many ways how you can be a faster animator. Now, speaking about fast, if you feel like I want to be fast and faster even with my help, I don't know if that works as a segue, but I do have workshops so you can sign up at any time. You can show me your shots, I can help you. Let's talk about those things that can make your shots even more awesome. So sign up. So check it out, I'll link in the description with all the information. You can sign up at any time. You can start whenever you want. It's all very flexible. And speaking of time, if you're still watching, thank you so much for watching. And since I didn't pitch anything at the beginning, here's my pitch at the end. If you like all those things, you can hit that like button. You can also subscribe if you want to hit that bell button so you don't miss any of my uploads and helps my channel grow. And hopefully you get notified about other future, hopefully awesome clips. And that's it. That's it for the pitch to pitch your pitch at the end. And that's that. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in my next upload.