timeline scrubbing.

# 1 10-03-2011 , 06:35 AM

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Join Date: Jun 2005

Location: Atlanta, GA

Posts: 258

working on a project.. a short 11 second animation <not for the website>

well i have it blocked out and all that good stuff..

Currently am tweaking it. throwing in betweens here and there ya know..

but i am totally peeved off at one thing. JUST ONE THING.

First all. I am working with Final Cut Pro and am able to scrub thru video left and right with no worries and smooth as buttercup pie. Yes.. I know it's a friggin video tho and is in memory ready for playblack.

But when I am scrubbing thru my animation on Maya If I wanted to scrub thru 10...20 frames back and forth. It's choppy and acts as if I still had it blocked out. it shows inbetweens yes.. but If I make something rotate in a arc motion. well.. I want to see a smooth arc when I scrub the sucker.

THE QUESTION.

Whats the deal here. Do I have to tweak it.. then PLAYBLAST that @#%@#... then view it and decide on if the tweak is good or not?

Should I not be able to scrub thru the timeline at a timely manner enough to view the new keys smoothly?

How can I get my scrubbing through my timeline smoother so I can speed up my animating? I feel the choppy scrubbing is slowing me down because I have to keep playblasting it just to see the flow of my animation.

I feel my video card is sufficient but I am not liking how this scrubs and feel it could be better.

Anyone?

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# 2 10-03-2011 , 02:07 PM

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Join Date: May 2003

Location: London

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Use a playblast, use lower res geometry to animate with and then switch to higher level of details for render, or use caches and your playback should get smoother as its just loading in data from memory or disk rather than evaluating the dag graph at every frame. If that doesnt work you need to upgrade hardware.

How heavy is your scene?

FX supervisor - double negative

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# 3 11-03-2011 , 01:54 AM

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Join Date: Jun 2005

Location: Atlanta, GA

Posts: 258

How heavy is my scene.

I am not sure.. I have a hundred key frames give or take.. including lip sync and face expressions..

Using Playblast.

that's what I want to not use to view a smooth scrub. I want to scrub it smoothly. It just makes sense that way and would be better for faster workflow..

mmm I feel my hardware is adequate for this.. 8 core 3.2 ghz.. 8gb ram <want more>.. quadro fx with 700+mb RAM..

Anyways.. this is ridonkulous.. the rig is "Eleven" from 11 second animation.. it's a rather simple rig with no fancy extra geometry.

Use Caches.

If I use a cache.. I would have to redo that everything I made an adjustment to the animation.. I think.. If i'm right.. that's about the same as having to use playblast.

Mmmm.. little aggravated..

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# 4 11-03-2011 , 02:37 AM

EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005

Location: Toronto

Posts: 3,374

If you go into wireframe mode, does that alleviate the lag? By heavy, it depends on the poly count, and how much is needed to be calculated by the computer (dynamics etc), it can be much more than a video file, depending. By the looks of it, you've got pretty nice hardware.

Or.... do you mean that it acts all blocky because you are only scrubbing a few frames, and each frame is significantly different from the last, so not smooth. If so, then there is a simple fix. In the Prefs, go to the Time Slider tab, then uncheck Snapping. You will now have a butter smooth animation curve, because it's interpolating sub-frames too. Be careful though, that you don't key on non-integer frames, cause that can get messy.

-stwert

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# 5 11-03-2011 , 10:31 AM

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Location: London

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Caches can help speed up playblasting on objects that your not working on. e.g. if your working on character or object x cache other characters or objects to make things work faster for you.

Also eleven isnt a complex rig but is there not a lower level of detail you can switch to. Its got alot of complex skinning going on there that it has to calculate every frame, most rigs have whats known as a 'can' mode which is just the orignal model split up and parented or constrained to joints rather than skinned. This will be able to play fluidly, at least thats what we do here.

With a cans displayed rig its just calculating transformation matrixes for each object where as with a fully skinned / deforming rig its doing a lot of math to work out where each vert should be, often its fine but it depends what kind of expressions are going on and how many layers of deformation there are.

FX supervisor - double negative

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timeline scrubbing.

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