 Welcome back to FNA and today I want to talk about workflow and specifically my default Maya workflow. So I want to start a new series about my animation workflow in terms of the tools that I use in scripts, how I animate, like all kinds of things that are hopefully helpful to you if you want to look at this and emulate this or build on top of that and so on and so on. But the first thing that I want to do is that if I open up Maya, how do I change Maya to make it better for my workflow so I'm faster? So this is not using any scripts or tools like animbot because you might not be able to afford them or you don't have access to them. So this is purely what can you do with Maya and specifically Maya 2020. Again, this is very subjectively. This is what I do in Maya 2020 when I first set it up so I can work faster. That being said, caveat, this is also a workflow I'm used to for like over a decade. This is how I started at school and then at ILM and it's just something I'm very comfortable with. I'm very fast using that type of setup, but I'm always looking at other workflows to see if I can incorporate something new and find ways to be faster. But I always kind of go back to that standard setup. So let's take a look at Maya when you first open it up and what do I change? So this is a brand new version of Maya 2020. I have not installed anything. I haven't done anything in terms of the layouts, the scripts or anything. So as I'm getting familiarized with 2020, I will definitely find new things. But usually what I do right off the bat, I open up my preferences and then I start changing some of the defaults that fit my workflow a bit better. I want this at 24 frames per second, which is the first thing that shows up. I don't go up on interface. I want to keep this on animation for sure. Then I'm going to settings. This seems to be all okay. Then animation, I'm going to put my tangents to linear, which is silly because I should keep them on spline because I switched to spline more instead of linear, but bear with me. This is just how I do it. I leave all of that depending on some whatever you work on or on the shows that work. Sometimes we enable and disable color management. Undo actions are finally on on infinite. You don't have to switch that off, but it's always good to see. So right off the bat, I want to do this. I'm also enabling auto key right here. I'm definitely a fan of that. And then I got to go in there and change my hotkeys. So you go into window settings, preferences and hotkey settings. And since this is 2020, some of the things have changed. So I'm going to create, duplicate this and create a new set called JDH. And there's some of the things I would like to change. So for instance, so I'm going to go into menu items. And I want to do something where I have nerves controllers on off. So there's a new hockey for this. So just to show you, if you do a nerves circle, and you got to show this in here, you see, this is your nerve circle. There is a hockey, which I believe is all one that turns this on off. But I have to tap and on tap. And I used to have this on actually G some lefty. So my left hand is for my pen. And my right hand is always in this position where I do everything around here. I don't want to change anything. I want this to be right around this area so I can be fast. So what I used to do is G press and release. So you can go back and you can see toggle nerves. If you look for this on application command, you find it here in its old one. So what you can do here, you say add additional hockey. And I want this to be G on press. And then also on release G save. So now what happens when I press, you can see this I press and release, press and release like this, you can see this press and release, press and release. So if I load up a rig, and this is Quinn from my animation mentor, who is super cute, I can just press and release, press and release to quickly see my curve. So if this is my shot camera, and I have some sort of animation on there, I don't have to go up and open this. So if I switch to this view, and you can see usually, actually, I do this here, I know this is super weird. And I don't know why sometimes this shows up as empty. Sometimes it's the outliner that's at the top. So I want this and this is also weird that we get two. So I want to just close this, then I want to add the graph editor. So that's actually usually my setup at work. And I have the channel controls here. That's usually kind of how I work. If I need more, I can do a tear of a copy here, which is off screen. But then I add this to to the left of my screen. If I need more and especially at work, we have a lot of assets and I do a lot of stuff where I need multiple outliers. So if we change this and create this perspective, let's say this is a shot cam, whatever you want to call this. And again, this is always strange. I need to figure out how to disable this, but this would be my shot cam. So this whatever I'm seeing in here, that's the view of the render. And here, and always in respect of what I can check if there's anything wrong in the 3D view. But if I need to animate in this again, hold and release, press and release, gives me a quick access to that. So that's kind of how I prefer to see things. Well, a lot of people do this, you do a right click here, and they do three panels split at the top. So then they switch this to the graph editor so they have a much bigger view. So this could be your perspective. And then in here, you would have your shot camera with all the textures and everything. And you can see that the press release is for every active view panel. It used to be that you have to designate panel four or three, whatever, in a custom script. So I like that Maya changed this where it's much easier to set up. And you can see here too that your hotkeys are visible if you change anything. So by default, Alt 2 will turn on off the polygons, which is really cool. There's a lot of workflow, faster workflow options right now. But anyway, this is not how I work. Again, I'll go back, then I'm going to switch this back to Outliner. Let's pretend this is the shot cam. And in here, I would have my perspective. And once again, close this. The other thing that I want to change is that I don't want to go in here and lower my hands to the arrow keys or whatever default there is, which I can't remember actually, to change the frame forward and back. I usually have it in Alt 4 and 5, which right now obviously doesn't do anything. So going back, you can search for frame. And you can see here, next frame, this is on the animation playback, next frame, previous frame. So I usually do next frame, Alt 5, previous frame, Alt 4. Save this. So let's say I change to a different scene here, which changed. And then I get additional things here. So there's always some funky things every now and then in Maya, but that is what it is, isn't it? So here we have again, my setup that I like. If I go in here, and I'm in a scene where you have the blinks, this is a bit slow. So I'm going to change this to body resolution low. And now you can scrub through and it's much faster. So this was my example that I tweeted out where you have your blink that's static. And then you have this, I want to show this frame by frame, bringing back the hotkey editor. I'm going to menu items and you can say, let's say just frame, and you have in animation playback and next frame and previous frame, I'm going to change this to next frame for me is Alt 5 and previous frame is Alt 4. I'm going to save this. And now you can see as I'm doing this, it goes back and forth. So now I can frame forward. And I can show exactly what I'm doing here frame by frame, again, because I would like to stay within my hand radius when I go back and forth. And I don't want to, I know it sounds trivial, like moving your hand over wasting time, but I want to be able to flip through my frames very quickly. At the same time, I also want to play this quickly. So again, opening up my hotkeys, there should be a playback toggle. There you go, playback toggle, which was actually missing in 19s back in 20. And I do this on Alt 6, actually, save. Let's move this out. So now I can press and stop, press and stop to quickly see what's going on. Of course, it also depends if you can have real time playback here. And then for five is to frame through and look at things. And again, all G press releases this. The other thing I want to change is my undo button. So if I go back and we check undo, I know again, this sounds trivial, but I took this from work undo, I have on the letter U. So save this. So I got over here, I take my eyes and I move those eyes around I want to undo, I can just move over my pinky and undo. Yes, I could do control Z. But this is something I'm used to since I worked at ILM to just undo using you. And it's for me, it's very helpful again, because it's very close to my pinky where I can do everything like this. G press release and U is for undo. The other thing that I want to change is that sometimes you have, let's say, let's look at a controller, we have a chest controller or something with more channels. Let's take the route. Here you have all your translates and rotates. If I hit S, that's usually keying everything. But I don't want to care because sometimes you have also scale and visibility, depending on what controller you use, you have all kinds of things here that I just don't want to key everything. So what I do, I'm going to delete this. I like to have a hot key where I only key what I selected in the channel editor. So if I select translate X, so when I open the script editor, then I'm going to clear the history, have it all empty. And when I do a key selected on this, you can see that it shows you what happened. But if you turn echo all commands on, and you do it again, you can see a lot more is showing up. I'm going to turn this off because I don't want this to show me everything. Now, as I'm going through the command that I want to look at is channel box command key. I'm going to copy that, go back into the hot key editor. And I'm going to do custom scripts over to runtime command editor, I'm going to do new, and I'm going to call this channel key, whatever, whatever you want to call this, and I'm going to duplicate this. And this is the command. I'm going to save that command. And I want to use this on s, not capital s, shift s, whatever you have, it's just s, I'm going to save this. And then when I go back to menu items, and I see a set key, you have here set key is empty, I want to do shift s. Save, save and close. So what does that all mean? So now when I select again, my cog, if I do shift s, it keys everything. Let's undo this. But now with my new script, I can just select this and hit just s, not shift s, and it only keys this. So if I have something like this, I can just key this because I don't always want to key everything. And then you end up having keys and everything here, this gets very complicated, I want to keep things clean. So for me, having something like that, where I can just say I only want to key whatever such a scale only, I can just hit s instead of always hitting everything and clogging up my graph editor. So in a nutshell, this is what I have, you got your frame forward, toggle and stop, you have press and release, you have your undo on a different one, you have your shift s and s for key framing. And that's my initial change of the setup, in terms of like this, and the keys. Now you might wonder, well, what about animal and all those other tools? There's so many great tools. I 100% agree. This is in case you do not have access to those tools, or you can't afford it. So what would you do if you just have Maya, right out the box, what could you do to just help your workflow? Because I don't want to always switch into perspective mode and then find this in case again, you don't have an anim picker, right? You don't always have all those tools. So how can I speed up my workflow so I can frame through and look at my eyeballing like, hmm, I prefer my offset to be even bigger. I can just do press G, and then look at this and look exactly how it's going to look like in my viewport. Instead of going in here and filling around, this is going to be much faster for me if I don't like this undo and so on and so on. So that is my initial setup when I use Maya with tools that are there right out of the box. There you have it. Maya 2020 has a lot of cool changes. So I'm going to definitely adapt and change my workflow and the upcoming chapters will incorporate different tools and scripts and things that I would like to use that again, speed my workflow up so I don't have to do things by hand or some kind of things that helped me just be a better animator that may or may not help you. I'm not sure if you have any other tools and comments and questions and requests. Comments are open as always. Leave me a comment of any tips that you have or maybe you use the same things that I do and you want to add something to that. And speaking of adding, I'm just trying to find a segue. If you feel like this adds to your workflow and you want me to add more things to you, I do have workshops if you want to work with me and you want me to help you with the shots that make them even more awesome. You can sign up for my workshops at any time. Link in description with all the information we can start whenever you want. And speaking of time, if you're still watching this, I really appreciate this. And if you don't want to miss anything that I upload, you can subscribe and hit that bell button so you get notified about all of the uploads if you want to do that. And other than that, I think that's it. I will say ta ta and see you in my next upload.