topic Motion Trails in Maya Animation and Rigging Forum

Motion Trails

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:26:48 GMT

I know and so will all of you probably that maya has this feutere of motion trails, for animation editing. And I was trying to use this as a begininer, because I do not know the "correct way" to fix my horrible interpolation. Please do not judge me on my horrible animating, but I had completed blocking out the small clip, and I wanted to know how to fix the interpolation. I look to motion trails, however it apears, I cannot seem to see the keys and edit them on the trail.

That is my problem, another thing if any of you would be so kind, do you guys think motion trails is the correct way to approuch the fixing of this horrible interpolation in the animation or shouldI just use more poses? I am a newbie and It would be great if you gus could help me out.

Re: Motion Trails

keith112 — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 13:14:27 GMT

I'm not sure if this will work but select all your controls for your character, go into your graph editor, go to the curves menu and select Euler Filter and see if that fixes it!?

Re: Motion Trails

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 23:05:59 GMT

Thx for trying, but that did not fix the issue it still remains the same, Could some one please tell me how I could ge the motion trails to work, and maybe even tell me what is the most effective path to fixing interpolation like this or avioding it

Re: Motion Trails

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 06:35:12 GMT

Could someone please help me that would be great

Re: Motion Trails

Cagetron — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 20:39:08 GMT

I would say that motion path thing is probably not the correct approach to fixing your interpolation problem. You are basically experiencing gimbal lock, something all 3d animators have to struggle with at some point or another. It looks like you're blocking out with step keyframes, not really worrying about what's happening to the rotations on your controls, then when you go to spline them, BAM it's all gimbaled to hell.

Change your rotate tool to gimbal mode and you can see what's happening. This is the mode that shows what your rotation curves in the graph editor actually represent. The 3 rotation axes solve in order, usually x-y-z, causing one axis to move the other two, one will only move one other, and one will only move itself. Gimbal lock in the graph editor will often look like 2 or 3 curves all moving 180 or 90 degrees creating a twisting motion, where the gimbal manipulator has two axis stacked right on top of each other. Trying to add more keyframes is often unsucessful as there's always a kink that is difficult to smooth out.

Like someone else suggested, if you take it off that motion path thing and run the Euler filter on those curves in the graph editor, it should unwind your curves to resolve the issue. Some animators just constantly run this filter to fix gimbal flipping. However, it sometimes doesn't work so great, it can screw with your tangents, and makes your curves reach higher and higher values and they extend in time.

Sometimes a rig will have two controls stacked on top of each other hierarchically so you can rotate the control below the translate node to help isolate a particular axis. In your case it would help to isolate the axis for your flips so you can get clean 360 rotations. You ideally want one smooth curve describing those flip motions, not a jumbled combination of all 3 curves rotating. Some rigs have a full body pivot control for rotating the entire rig around a moveable point.

Sometimes you can find a pose that is close to the one you want but doesn't gimbal the curves. There's no perfect solution and you just have to find what works for you and how you personally want to deal with it in different situations. Hope this helps, good luck!

Re: Motion Trails

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Feb 2016 23:56:39 GMT

THX alot man, really helped out and allowed me to take a new step and learn more.

Ofc it is not polished and rendered, but it was always meant to simply be a improved quick aniamtion to help me improve. Its not the best obviosly but at least I could get some sort of result and progress forward. Thank you for your time it means alot!