Animation Hotkeys UPDATED!

I've been fairly busy with moving to LA, working, and finding a place to live, BUT I have been animating, I've just been animating things that I either not ready to show or can't show because of copyright.

In the mean time, since I'm working in Maya at my job, I decided to carve out a bit of time to dust off my old hotkey script and give it some much needed updating. If you aren't familiar with my little script, I made it a few years ago when I was working in the labs at school but wanted a nice easy way to port around my hot keys since I use them so much. Yeah, there are ways to copy paste preferences and files like that, but I've taken enough scripting classes that this somehow easier and clearer to me.

I put up my old script on Creative Crash (back then it was still High End 3D) in 08 and it has since been downloaded 390 times which isn't a whole lot compared to many scripts, but for a little text file I made two years ago I think it's not too shabby.

It now makes hotkeys to perform more common tasks like moving keys around in the graph editor, opening the outliner, and performing playblasts. You can check it out to find out all the goodies, but essentially it all saves time by not having to navigate to any menus to do most of the common tasks while animating. I'd pick my favorites, but it's just about all of them, especially the moving frames keys and the copy paste keys for the graph editor (and the key individual attribute and...)

Oh and what's a post without any pictures to look at?

Here's a quick test I just did for a video game company in Oregon called Cinematics. Sadly I don't enjoy working with rigs when I'm not a fan of their design, so I could have probably strengthened just about every pose. That's also a factor of my new working method in combination with no real planning, just sketching out the animation as I went. All in all, I had 8 hours to do the test and I think it turned out fairly well considering. I'm especially just enjoying my new method of working in spline from the very first pose and how that speeds me up and makes me think of the physicality a lot better. The main thing I'm combating right now is that it also makes me sloppy with my posing, but I think some more solid planning and taking more time on each pose will help that tremendously.


PS: If you check out the script and have any problems with it, let me know. It should be fairly straight forward as I'm a huge fan of simple scripts where you just have to paste it in and hit go.