Nathan Horne – Technical Artist

I’ve been working on a new clip tool for the animators at work, here’s what it looks like so far:

Current features:

• Full support for animation layers
• One to One curve reconstruction, exactly what you save comes back (Tangents, broken tangents, free’d weights, etc..)
• Fast import/export
  • Export of my test animation takes about 2 seconds for a 2,200 frame animation with 70 controls (1 key per control per frame)
    • *Not including time for the playblast to capture for the preview. There is an option to only store the first frame preview if the animator chooses.
  • Import of the same animation takes 3 to 4 seconds
• Small file size: <7 megabytes for 2,200 frame test animation including the preview avi (Animation is ~2.3mb of that after compression)
  • Typical size for a 24-30 frame animation with hand keyframing (Not solid mocap keys) typically runs at 100-400kb per animation including preview avi
• Preview window
  • loads animation previews on the fly – Can load ~4.5mb avi from the compressed clip in about .1-.5 seconds
  • Play, pause, scrub, and manually enter time to preview from avi
  • Completely internal to Maya. Doesn’t even use PyQt or any sort of plug-ins
• Clip capture dialog with options, and a custom preview window that allows you to edit the render camera
• Additional metadata stored inside the file, can hold any arbitrary data, and is easy to read and manipulate while leaving the clip data intact
  • By default stores information like: Who exported the clip, when was it exported, what controls were exported with/without namespaces, what time does it start and end, total frame count, total keyframe count, etc…