Maya 2017 Time Editor and Relocator bugs

[Anonymous]

Moving to the new Time Editor has not been as universal as autodesk has mentioned.  Specifically with custom rigs I'm getting double transforms on local based IK controls, rotation errors on all controls and sometimes it just doesn't work and move any nodes.  Is anyone else using maya 2017 for production experiencing any of these issues?  Seems to work perfectly find with HIK, however it should be noted that our project is a Z-Up environment.  I know HIK doesn't play nice with our skeleton because of our base "A" framed pose and our character is Z-up instead of Y like HIK used to need. 

However, I was lead to believe that the new Time Editor basically provided much needed Trax/Story Tool functionality with the added bonus of working for any rig created.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Having same troubles.  Time Editor also seems to cause Maya to crash, and we are working on very powerful machines: So this shouldn't be happening.  Also, I am running into issues with not being able to tweak the HIK rig on Fbx animations within the time editor.  There seems to be a disconnect.  Maya site says I should be able to do it by creating clip layers, but I can't access the controls at all.  If you have any insight on this, please do share!  

The time editor is a great tool in theory, but like you said it just does not work as well as advertised.  And since it is so brand new, there are very few tutorials on it.  I've already ran through all of them, multiple times. 

[bobtilton]

Were you ever able to make the additive/override layers work with keying HIK rigs in the Time Editor? I am finding bupkis for solutions.

[Anonymous]

I know this is old thread, I'm actually looking for a solve to a new problem.  When creating  a relocator for one of my clips, the orientation (object) is off.  I need this to be corrected  if relocating is to work as intended. Any body have any ideas of what might be the cause.  I cannot share the file as we are under NDA.  

As to what you mentioned about time editor crashing maya, time editor creates a alot of nodes that are not cleaned up by "optimizing scene size".  If you uncheck show "DAG Objects" only in the outliner.  You can see all the nodes it creates: You'll see that it creates a translation/orientation/scale node for every clip imported into the time editor.  This adds up really quickly.  What we've been doing is focusing locking down animation by creating  a 'stringout' so to speak, and then baking to a singular clip, and exporting as an FBX, then reimporting.  This allows us to cleanup the file and bring file size down by more than half.  I know it seems counter-intuitive considering the purpose of the time editor (non-destructive animation blending), but when you use mocap (as we do), you are pretty much already locked in to much of of your animation.  But you can still do additives and overlays after executing this, and not worry about crashing.  Also, us mb. not ma. when using the time editor, this will avoid create GB file sizes.

[tj.galda]

Thanks for posting the bugs & some of your solutions.  It'll be helpful for us to dig in to it.

For relocators specifically, you should be able to do what you're asking.  This video might help, around 12mins in:

https://youtu.be/EqSeVY8-paU?t=706

Let me know if that helps and we can go from there.

In general, the time editor is very much a version 1.  So it's certainly not a universal solution and we intend to add a number of other features & improvements as we get time.  Currently we're working on core animation improvements and it would be a great time to jump on our beta forums to see the new stuff & give us feedback on it.

[Anonymous]

Hi,
You can see that this is an early version. If I am not mistaken it was introduced in Maya 2017. Now we have version 2019 and the tool is still not suitable for production. It is full of errors, but we already know it. Autodesk has accustomed us to such a policy.

Worse still, Time Editor has conceptual errors. For example, when I try to edit curves from a clips in the Graph Editor. The clip starts on frame 50. But curves are visible always from frame 0. Of course, because of this it is not possible to edit curves, because somewhere else we have the clip somewhere else the curves.

The Autodesk film elegantly avoids such problems by showing the situations in which everything works. But in real work these errors completely disqualify a tool.

[Anonymous]

I think the problem is subscription. The company does not have to do anything and earns money. Let's not deceive ourselves, the supervisory board is not passionate about animation, it's not even passionate about good products. They are passionate about earning money and optimizing costs. They could produce fridges if they earned more on it. Maybe one day we will see Autodesk Fridges.

[Anonymous]

I understand that he is working on it:) 

[tj.galda]

Hi info & j_oll,

Thanks for joining our conversation, I wish you would do so in a more productive way.

Your comments are not constructive and hurtful.  Hurtful?  Yes, because we DO care.  I personally was looking through our backlog scrubbing bugs until past 1am last night.  I wanted to make sure the team is focused on the most important things.  I have been using Maya for over 2 decades myself and DO care about how to continually make it the best.  I have used it everywhere from teaching students to large feature animation places & large game studios.  I know there are warts in there, that's easy to find and point out.  Guess what?  That's easy to do for all software.  I'm all for finding out what to fix & help us prioritize so we do it in the right order, but please do so in a way that you realize we're all humans on the dev team too and are trying our absolute best.

I made some tough choices.  I did that.  There's no large greedy team trying to sell fridges.  I purposefully chose for the team to focus on making cached playback amazing because the vast majority of customer feedback all validated that people would love a lot of different things but speed was #1.  So we worked very hard for over 30 months to make cached playback really push the performance.  I've seen first hand large film companies smiling by the speed and game of the year products jump from 1 fps to over 35fps.   By doing so, I chose to focus on making that awesome which meant other things couldn't also be worked on.  That's ok.  We have to make hard choices and I stand by that.  If you don't like what I've prioritized, let me know directly.  I'm always willing to hear from anyone using Maya.  That's one of the reasons I'm not only on the road a ton visiting customers, but also on twitter, discord, instagram and more...  We fold all that input into our decision making process and don't take it for granted.

If you (or anyone) would like to have a proper discussion, feel free to DM me and we can arrange a phone call as that will be far easier than going back and forth on a forum.

The team is currently fixing a number of core animation features and adding a bunch of improvements around the graph editor, timeline, and even some stuff to help with how audio works in relation to doing lipsync, etc.  On top of that, I've identified a number of bugs that will really make a difference.  They're all minor bugs but a few of those add up to make for the graph editor feel a little off.  Some of the bugs I've identified are literally from Maya version 1.  That's ok, we've all lived with those for well over 20 years and were deemed shippable.  But we're looking & always assessing on how we can refine Maya even more.

The time editor will get the next wave of improvements after that, so it's a good time to give us feedback and help inform our design team in a constructive way.

tj

[Anonymous]

Hi, cashe playback is really a great solution. It's basically the only novelty in Maya 2019. But for me it's ok. I prefer Autodesk to introduce one thing. Our frustration is due to the fact that we work in this program. Maya's reputation is largely made up of hundreds of artists who do amazing things. But almost every user who uses Maya sees that there is something wrong. Consciously releasing unstable functions. Let's say Xgen, a nightmarishly error-prone tool. The lesson is to learn how to avoid these limitations. Suddenly Autodesk shows Xgen Interctive Groming. It looks great, but there will be some testing and you see a big problem. Maya nodes doesn't work with Xgen Interctive Groming. Information in which Michel TodD confirms that this pale is known. And what, it is 3 years and nothing. This is not trivial pale. This pale discredit tool for procedural work, typical for hair. The student will make a ball of hair but in production it is not suitable. Why do you introduce a tool and such errors, it looks as if no one who works with hair tested this tool in real life. But even if the users report a mistake, nothing happens. 3 years old, so what is it all about. Time Editor. Did any animator test it. No, not possible. Because every animator would report these errors. Or maybe he tested it. What is worse, because it means that you are consciously releasing a tool that is not suitable for work. As if you were looking at it, it is difficult to find a sensible explanation for these situations.