Maya Animator Tries Blender

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[lucianomunoz]

Mistake number one: Blender is not "free maya" :)

[DrTheRich]

The reason you still saw the rig in the graph editor while selectin the plane is because the rig is pinned to always be visible in the graph editor. If you look at the listing on the left of the graph editor, you see that for the rig that little pinboard prick icon is active. Which means it'll be visible no matter what is selected.

[RiggingMentor]

RIG vs. Object in the graph editor. Blender has a concept of ACTIVE and Selected, meaning that something can remain selected as an object even if you jump out of Pose mode and select something else.
The Graph editor curve isolation speed is big and while it is is being worked on in Blender, it is out of the box a much better experience in Maya. Someone mentioned it already but the Hide/Hide unselected hotkeys are required to learn so you can quickly isolate the selected channel.

Vertical scale zoom: good point and the way and there isn't a way that I can find to do that exact thing you can sort of control it with zoom to mouse preference with the scroll wheel but that exact action is better in Maya until we find out otherwise.

No stacked curve view but normalized is possible.

Autokey and keying sets is all being worked on and needing improvement many of us feel and are working on it actively.

The size bar menus is not the channelbox, the Sidebar (N) item view does show selected bones attributes.

The "Doesn't Autokey" example when you rotated the bone, it doesn't have an existing keyframe on it so it will not get keyed just changing the value...and depending on your animation preferences it will do the same thing when you rotate. This is part of the autokey improvement that needs to happen in some ways and others it is just different...but overly complex while lacking some of the control expected and why there is a lot of work looking at how best to improve it now in the animation module.

The camera: Object change near the end is also a pain when you are still thinking in Maya language /interaction mode and honestly when you are used to it after a little while don't get in the way overall but for sure it is a tripping hazard and a learning curve much like Jumping between MotionBuilder, Max, Maya, Unreal etc. if an animator is used to just working/staying in Maya then there is a sometimes steep ramp in some places and there are going to be things that just flat out are better in Maya or whatever you are most used to/learned first.

Nice work exploring the tools though and I will share this with the Animation Module as well to get more eyes on it from dev. side.

[AgeOfGarSkew]

Same, long time Maya animator now mostly enjoying Blender. Welcome to Blender animation, there aren't many animators in Blender yet, not pros at least which is why the animation side is less developed than the modeling/rendering side. But it's changing and changing fast. To answer your questions:
First thing I notice is you still go through the UI to switch between Object/Edit/Pose modes, use the hotkeys, you'll get to be earlier.
3:08 You can still use the manipulator all you want. But getting used to the hotkeys does speed you up. I switch between both still.
4:35 You accidentally pinned your Rig object in the graph editor that's why it shows up even when deselected. Just hit the Pin icon so it goes back to being an outline.
5:20 Solo curves: Click the Eye next to Torso and all the curves will be hidden, then you can unhide just the curve(s) you want to work with. Maya still has a better workflow with Fcurves in general.
6:50 Yes it zooms around the center of that window. you can select your keys or whatever you are trying to zoom in on then frame it "." hotkey. then zoom from there.
7:24 inserting a hotkey: you can fix it once and for all in the Timeline window. On the left side you'll see "Keying" dropdown. In the "Keying" dropdown you'll find the "Active Keying set" Field probably blank if you never touched it. Click and scroll down to the "Location/Rotation/Scale and Custom properties" one. Now every time you hit I or whatever your set key button is, it'll key everything without prompting with a dropdown. You can save that setting in your default file so you never have to think about it again.
Another cool thing about "I" shortcut it works when you hover over any channel in the menus that is keyable. Also as you hover on that channel, the left and right keys to jump to the previous/next keyframe also work which can be helpful if you key channel properties on materials or outliner visibility, renderability...
8:00 The Menu on the Right is not your channels. Those are tucked away behind the hard to notice little arrow in the top right of your 3D viewport. You can hit "n" while hovering over the 3d port to hide/unhide it. Or pull the little arrow tab with your mouse. Those are your channels which will switch when you switch modes. the Sidebar menu is just an additional way to access the same data.
9:25 with Auto Key on: Dragging values in the channel will only set a key if a key already exists on that channel. Unlike the 3d Viewport where pulling a control will set a key when the channel hasn't been keyed at all.
10:45 Contextual menus only show up for the active object/element which is the last thing you have selected. It usually shows up in Orange (instead of dark orange) for objects. and whatever color set you have for control bones on the rig.

But as you concluded, yes don't expect your Maya habits to help you in Blender lol. Just like you can't expect your native language to help you in a country with a different language. You gotta become bilingual. @PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN has some helpful animation centric tutorials.
Good luck !

[fabianogama]

Hi, I'm an animator to, I've been animating in Maya for about 10 years, before that I animated for 5 years in 3DsMax. In the last few mnths I've been animating in Blender for personal projects and I understand your frustration. When I started learning Blender I thought people in Blender foundation HATED animators, but now Blender has become my favorite tool for animation, not that Maya isn't a a great softare, it is. Not only that, but learng blender improved my hability to use Maya. That being said, let me answer below you kind request for tips and alternatives on the things you talked about in your video.I think it may be useful to other people what may be going through this adaptation jorney as well.

[dsjasonh]

there is an option called "lock object mode" unde edit tab I remember. it's enabled by default. if u disable it, than u can seamlessly "move" between "pose mode" of an armature and object mode of any object

[ILLRICARDO]

I too feel that blender is too overwhelming, maya is more comfortable, i have tried learning blender to animate, but i find it better for modelling, and prefer maya for animation.

[kebrus]

Hint: stop thinking like maya, blender has a different and much better UI/UX, you keep trying to bring your UI/UX muscle memory from maya.

One of the reasons why people like blender shortcuts is because they are not just shortcuts, they complement the UI/UX, you can be in pose mode and select other objects while still being able to enter and exit edit mode of each one of them using the shortcut (tab for me). Also you can swap between object and pose mode with Ctrl+Tab.

Blender is data driven, objects are just an abstraction, what matters is the data they contain, one object contains skeleton data while another contains vertex data. Why is this important? because it's one of the bases why an edit mode exists. You enter edit more to edit the data the object contains and you use modifiers on the object because you don't want to change the data inside, you want to modify the object.

If you are struggling with the idea of going from edit mode to object and then to pose mode think when would you want to both animate and change the bones inside. This is like saying I'm making my rig while I animate.

QWE versus GRS: It funny how you said "I just want to grab things and move it". Blender defaults try to use the human common sense and intuition, yes you can change them but the only reason you are having a hard time is because you trained yourself with a different standard, for you it would be a matter of time. I can as easily press G to "grab", lock or not axis, enter precision mode or not, confirm or cancel with mouse buttons (no need to esc), and, more importantly it's much faster. why? because you need control over the gizmo, you need to select the arrows, square, circles, lines, etc which you do by looking at the gizmo, this takes your eyes of your subject. I only look at my model and bones and all actions are loosely achieved while being precise. A trained person using shortcuts will always be faster than a trained person using tools/gizmos. Regardless of what shortcut you use. BTW, there's another reason why all shortcuts (not just for animation) use these weird letters. 80 to 90% of the time if you think about the action you want to do the shortcut uses that action initial letter, sometimes with a modifier like shift/ctrl/alt.

In graph editor you can click the root track hide button to hide everything and then show only the one you care about, however there's a better way, you can select one or more of the channels and hit Shift+H (H for hide and shift to make it exclusive), this will show just the ones you selected and hide everything else, you can also do Alt+H to unhide everything. Yeah I know it's one more click than in maya, but this generates less confusion, why would selecting something hide something else. I would however perhaps change this so you could use a modifier key and mouse click to replicate the same behavior as maya without having to select first, the problem though is that the modifiers are already use for selection patterns of the channels. No winning here, selection patterns is more consistent with the rest of the software, and you want consistency in a software.

Zooming in the graph editor, the dot in the numpad is your friend, to be honest I don't like the 2D zoom to always be centered either and I think it could be changed or adjusted with a modifier key, like Shift+Ctrl which is not occupied by anything, so this could be improved. However you can use the dot key to focus on your selection, if it's a single selection point it will go to the center of the screen when then you can do the 2D zoom and have the exact same behavior, but this is not really convenient. I'm not sure if I understood what you meant by normalized curves, do you mean to resize your canvas to fit the curves? if yes you need to use the dot key (focus) to do that, you select however many things you want, you can select all by pressing A for example and then focus and it will adjust the canvas to your selection.

I also think there should be a single click key to insert a keyframe in the last mode you selected, not sure why this isn't a thing by default, but you can change in the remap settings, you can make it to use a single key to do one of the option and a combo for the popup for example.

You asked what is the point of the pose mode if it doesn't switch to armature during selection. Like I explained before the armature is just an object with data inside (in this case bones), if you are animating, what would you possibly want to do with the object that holds your data? You did a better question afterwards about why it doesn't change automatically the context depending on your selection, while many software do that it's not a well defined problem that can be easily solved, what would you show automatically when selecting the armature? the armature details? the bones details? and more importantly how would I then see other data? would I then need to click to switch? so if then select something else and come back I would need to re-select it. There's no clear winner here, I work with both in different software and never had any problems adjusting, they have their pros and cons, not changing things dynamic is more beginner friendly because the UI isn't changing all over the place over simple things, it also more work friendly in the sense that when you are doing tasks in 3D you usually stay doing the same task to the same data all the time, and you change only when you want to do something different. This way you can set it once and forget.

The issue with selecting the camera also seems stupid to me. Not sure why it works that way.

Background image works as a overlay on the screen, if you want something in 3D you'd use a 3D plane instead.

Render times are dependent on settings and content, you can blame the default settings but why is that surprising? Would you prefer garbage but fast rendering as default?

Blender is missing proper animation layers, Maya wins this, no contest here. Blender is adding their own but it wasn't released yet. If you are used to them, you'll miss them.

[roxonogueira]

At 5:20 when you try to select and isolate channels, just turn on "Only Selected Curve Keyframes" on the Graph Editor's View menu. It will work just like you want. On Blender 4.0 that option has been changed to Preferences - Animation.

[weeliano]

I'm a long time Blender User and I also teach both Maya and Blender, when I use each software, I stick to the software's hotkeys and shortcuts. I never and do not recommend changing Blender's shortcuts to match Maya's. Blender's shortcuts are designed to work very efficiently when used well. The modes changes take some time to get used to especially for people coming over from Maya, but in the long run, I feel it is superior to Maya as you won't accidently enter component mode when you right click on an object. As for the matchmoving tracker in Blender, I have used SynthEyes and even ILM's in house MARs matchmover, and Blender's tracker when used correctly works fantastic. Your tracking shot is a Nodal tripod shot, there's not much parallax I can see so if you track it as a free cam you won't get much good results. You should set the tracker to solve as a tripod shot and it will give you much better results. Anyway, this is a good video to show the frustrations of Maya users coming over to Blender, but trust me, Blender when mastered can do pretty much what the rest of the "industry standard" software can do.

[fjsv_omg]

You can tick the key frame button on the right if you want to set a frame on the transform or right click + s to set it after changing the transform

[kuromiLayfe]

A great tip when animating in blender and still want to be able to select stuff…remember that each window segment is its own area, so you can have one area be object mode and another the pose mode..

[mikeswanston]

It looks like you had the FinishedRig pinned in the graph editor which is probably why it wasn't going away even though it wasn't selected. The toggle is to the left of the visibility toggle you were clicking.

[Tranmaart]

5:59 Maybe this help, because i have no that weird zoom on curves, it works as should. I switched to Blender in 2022 from 3Ds Max after 16 years. I started with 2.93, but i changed lot of settings at first day and i just copy and rename profile folder to new releases and still working:
It looks like this now in my Preferences/Navigation:
Orbit Method: Turntable
Orbit Sensitivity: 0.35°
Orbit Around Selection: ⬛
Auto Perspective ☑
Depth ☑(Important)
Smooth View: 200
Rotation Angle: 15.000
Zoom Method: Dolly
Zoom Axis: Vertical
Zoom to Mouse Position ☑(Important)
Invert Zoom Direction: Mouse ⬛
Wheel ⬛

[vikkiarts]

To work easily between rig and other objects you have to disable "Lock Object Modes" under the 'Edit' menu on top left corner of the window.
This saves you from the hassle you were having with modes 1:29

[fadhil]

4:30 you gotta click on the pin icon 📌 of the rig graph. I believe it must've been off by default, so you probably misclicked it or something

But yeah I understand, learning a new software after using a different software with the same type for years is kind of ridiculously frustrating

[SlayerDUDE]

I actually hate that maya have no separations between modes because I always end up selecting stuff that I dont want to select, like when editing verteces I accidently select another object just because maya gives sht about what type of an element or an object you want to work with

[SlayerDUDE]

1:50 activate pie menu on drag in the preferences man, so you easily by Tab+MouseDown move to pose mode from any other mode as far as you have an armature rig selected, it is really fast

[SecretDesignerXD]

Man using Cycles default setting CPU, 4096 sample, OpenImageDenoiser and questioning why it take 4 min a frame

[dtrip]

I am new to Blender too: for selecting without changing modes, does using the outliner remove one step? I know when I am in Edit mode, just clicking another object in the outliner automatically changes me out of edit, and onto the object I selected.