Maya Animation :: Assigning Expressions To Animated Attributes?
Dec 30, 2012
I've set keyframes on the Glow Intensity attribute of an object so I can slowly reduce the intensity at certain points. Now I need to create a new expression to give a random flickering to the glowing object as the scene plays, until the glow finally dims out.
But when I select Glow Intensity and try to create the Expression, there is no option now to 'Create New Expression'. The other options are still there, but it seems that at the top I'm left with an option relating to the Animation Curve Attributes (animCurveTU..?)
Is there no way to add a rand() expression to give some flickering to the Glow Intensity if I also have a few keyframes set that slowly dim the overall intensity level? Surely not.
I've tried to manually create the expression in the Expression Editor, but when I have to type in the name of the attribute, it hangs the whole program and I have to kill Maya and restart. Either it will not work that way or I'm missing something.
Maybe another way get the flickering short of manually keyframing the intensity level for the entire sequence.
My model has turbine engines complete with blades.
After attaching the engine to the rest of the model, I tried to animate the blades using Cycles, however, because the engine itself is attached with a 15-20º incline, the blades do not rotate around -360 properly. The illustration below shows the blades at the -89º mark.
How do I reset the pivot point for the Rotate Tool, or at least compensate for the offset pivot?
why my video plays faster than the set animated sequence i have saved in the playback preferences. I have a camera on a motion path and have slow the playback speed to 3fps yet when i play the avi video in quicktime after it's rendered it plays much faster.
For certain and obvious reasons i need to delete history, problem is since i never deleted it, certain problems occur, like the very binding of my character to the skeleton is undoed, is there a way out of this mess, i just want the texture to stop moving when animation starts.
I have made a custom attribute roller for the shoulders on my robot.So he can turn left and right I have set -
-90 = -90 Degrees 90 = 90 Degrees and 0 keyed in the center (to allow the set driven keys to be set)
However, when i go from left to right or vice versa in the animating stage the attribute eases into 0 (from -90) and eases back out again on the way to 90. I have used Linear Tangents in the graph editor but this has no effect.
I would like to assign attributes to polylines so when I draw out a wiring diagram I can label the wire without having to type it out every time. I was thinking maybe a linked table or something not sure.
wondering how to implement the many facial expressions from facegen to 3ds max to use as morph targets for facial animation. fairly new to max animation.
I have a drawing with a bunch of blocks. the blocks repeat themselves, but I need to define different attributes to each one of them and then being able to extraxt a list that I can read in excel.
Any routine that will allow to draw a polyline through existing blocks, in the order the blocks should be numbered? Therefore when the sequence has been specified by the polyline then user to define the number system required, and the blocks are automatically numbered in the sequence of the polyine start to finish.
I'm trying to assign a jpg file to an eyeball and the file (containing the retina of the eyeball) comes out enlarged, even though it is not supposed to.
I'm using Blinn Material and hypershade to bring that texture to the eyeball, but every single time I try it, it comes out enlarged (see image attached). I've made sure I click on the Planar Mapping key before I try to copy the image onto my eyeball. I've also tried modifying the size of the image on Photoshop but not luck. If it matters, I'm using Windows 7.
I have several parts that at a point in time come together and need to rotate together around a common point. However, when I animate them it will only let me rotate them around each individual part's axis. How can I temporarily link these parts to a parent dummy object so that I can rotate them together? I want this to happen midstream in the animation and after the rotation I will be decoupling the parts and having them do different things..
I've created my blend shapes and in the process of creating states for for the master button control. When i assign a state the slave mesh moves from it's position far off into the scene but the the state is applied to it. My question is how do i get the slave mesh to stop moving when i create a state and assigning it?
I have rigged a character and made it into a character set in which i have locked the scaling attribute , I have then saved this file. I have then referenced this file and and have done a walk cycle animation and saved this file. I have then realised that I needed the scaling attribute when I have added other parts of my scene. Is there a way to unlock the scaling attribute in my walk cycle animation file or will i have to go back and change it in the rigged file, create a new character set and do the walk cycle animation again?
My current scene has 10 animation layers for a character, and seeing every f-curve from all layers, although grey and locked, when I only need to see the f-curves in layer I'm working on is really cluttering the graph editor. My current work around is selecting my active layer in the Layer Editor every time I select a rig control. Simple enough, but a pretty inefficient way of working. I can't seem to find a setting that allows me to just see ONLY the fcurves in the active layer. I imagine some of you out there may have hundreds of animations for a single game character.
I'm trying to animate a moving rope based on simulation data. I know how to import my motion data for individual objects.I've seen lots of tutorials where one uses simulations or soft bodies with IK in order to create a rope. how to use all these features and I want the rope to follow my coordinates exactly. I was hoping I could do something like the following:
1. create points in Maya which correspond to my data points 2. connect the points with a curve 3. loft a circle using the curve as a path in order to make a rope 4. move the points. due to History, the rope position is updated
Is there a way to do something like this in Maya? I've tried, and it looks like ep points do not have key-able channel data, so I can't create animations for them separately. I'm using .mov data file imports to generate x, y, and z motion keys for the points.
I have an assignment for a class where part of the final project is detailing the construction of a mold for a part. The animation that I would like to do would show the build up of the part in a 3D printer layer by layer. The closest method of animating this that I can think of is unfortunately backwards.
As I would have the part and a camera facing up from the bottom of the part and would have a plane that would recede upwards in the y direction. This would reveal the part as the plane translates in the y direction.
This might be okay, but the problem is that I would like to show this from a camera on top facing down instead of a camera on bottom facing up. How I can create the look of a part being built up in this additive method?
I am trying to add an expression to the standard Mudbox car to make the wheels turn when the vehicle moves in both the X & Z dimension. I have found many scripts that let me do this in a single dimension. I have found some others that claim to work for both dimensions, but at certain angles the wheels turn in the wrong direction.
My work flow is as follows: 1 - Export car from Mudbox to Maya 2 - Separate the wheels & center pivot all items 3 - Add NurbsCurves to create a rig 4 - Parenting the elements of the car 5 - Add an expression based on this web post [URL]....... 6 - Test the animation
It works great when translating the car in the Z axis, but when the car is rotated 95 degrees in the Y axis the wheel will only go backwards no matter which direction the car is moved.
I have attached an MB (Maya 2013) so you can see the
translate facial motion capturing data (basically 2d point clouds) to blendshape weights. I finished rigging my character and wanted to drive my blendshapes by the relative position of my tracking data, e.g. distance between corners of the mouth drive the "wide" blendshape and so on...
Hope YOU know a solution for this, I believe blendshapes are THE way to create realism in tracked animation but I was not able to find ANY reference to something like that. I'd like it to be customizable and not to expensive, so the imagemetrics faceware service won't do for me
How come baking some part of animation in graph editor deletes everything before and after the part i bake and how can i bake that part while leaving the rest untouched?
I have a character with animation. Another character is the same(same bones, meshes), but with no animation, 100 times larger in size and I resize the head to make the head looks slimmer. They are saved in different fbx files and I imported them into mb scenes. I select the root bone and "select hierarchy", the export options is shown below. Then select in the same way in the larger character's scene, the importer options is shown below. THE PROBLEM is: after I import the atom, the character becomes shrinked to the same size as the former one and the ratio of head becomes the same as the former one too.
For some scenes we have a chain which is wrapped around several cogs, just like a bicycle. In this scenario we need the chain links to follow the path and retain their relationship to each other.
In other scenes we have a chain which follows along a changing path. Imagine this if you can: A heavy weight has a chain attached which goes vertically up, over a pulley and down the other side where it is attached to a lorry. The lorry drives off pulling the weight upwards. This is my challenge!
Should I individually constrain the links using a Pin constraint and use dynamics completely to keep the chain taught?
Was wondering if there is a way of getting random camera movements? For example, i am doing a fly through of an earthquake scene and as the camera animates along the street it randomly shakes with the earthquake shocks.
I know I could animate it by hand but I wondered if there was a way (perhaps an expression) to make it more simple?
I'm finding inside 2012 viewport 2.0 that animated textures appear unsupported. They work fine in the regular Default Quality and High Quality modes, but 2.0 as well as rendering in Hardware 2.0 leave the images static.
I have tried iff sequences but it doesn't work for those either.
I want to key frame animate something to go in a straight line but it seems to start out slowly, speed up, and then slow down again at the end. Is there a way to make it so the object moves the same speed throughout?
I have an animation layer that I have exported and Im trying to import it into a new file and then merge it down to the base layer.
what ends up happening is that when I do the merge i get two additional layers. and the layer with the animation stays there. and nothing gets baked. the animation stays in the imported layer.
I should be able to import/export animation layers right?
I have a image plane. I would like to move the image of the plane in animation. It looks out then masking. I need only some parts of the image in frame one, and I need other parts of the image on frame 100. The plane isn't moving, only the image is moving in the box.
