Tips and Tricks
Here are a collection of tips and tricks that I use while animating.
Sometimes while trying to optimize your scenes you may get a camera or two in your scene that you can't seem to delete because they appear to be locked.
Reason being, because they were most likely default cameras (persp and front) that were imported from another scene. This could happen while laying out and importing different characters or environments into one scene. Anyways to unlock and delete them try this.
(Just replace "cameraName" with the name of the camera you are trying to delete.)
2. Frame Counter
3. Lock Geometry and Make Unselectable Without Using Layers
Selecting controllers in layout and accidentally selecting geometry can get pretty irritating while you're trying to animate. There are two ways you can go about locking your geometry.
The first method you simply place the geometry onto a display layer and set that layer to "reference".
My preferred method is to not use layers. Sure layers won't increase your file size dramatically, but they can add up and if you're wanting to optimize your scene files to be more efficient, this is one way you can go about doing that.
Maya
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1. Delete Locked CamerasSometimes while trying to optimize your scenes you may get a camera or two in your scene that you can't seem to delete because they appear to be locked.
Reason being, because they were most likely default cameras (persp and front) that were imported from another scene. This could happen while laying out and importing different characters or environments into one scene. Anyways to unlock and delete them try this.
(Just replace "cameraName" with the name of the camera you are trying to delete.)
- Use MEL Script : lockNode -lock off cameraName;
- Then delete camera.
- If that doesn’t work use MEL Script : camera -e -startupCamera false cameraName;
- Then delete camera.
2. Frame Counter
- Use MEL Script :
//ADDING FRAME COUNTER
headsUpDisplay
-section 5
-block 1
-blockSize "small"
-dfs "large"
-ao 1
-l frame
-command "currentTime -q"
-atr
HUDFrameCount;
3. Lock Geometry and Make Unselectable Without Using Layers
Selecting controllers in layout and accidentally selecting geometry can get pretty irritating while you're trying to animate. There are two ways you can go about locking your geometry.
The first method you simply place the geometry onto a display layer and set that layer to "reference".
My preferred method is to not use layers. Sure layers won't increase your file size dramatically, but they can add up and if you're wanting to optimize your scene files to be more efficient, this is one way you can go about doing that.
- Select geometry and go to attribute editor.
- Go over to the "shape node" and go down to "drawing overrides".
- Enable overrides and change display type to "reference".
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4. Putting Image Sequences and Sound Together in Quicktime
A nice quick way of putting together image sequences and sound files.
4. Putting Image Sequences and Sound Together in Quicktime
A nice quick way of putting together image sequences and sound files.
- Start Quicktime and go to “File/Open Image Sequence”. Select the first image in your sequence and select the desired frame rate.
- Open up Audio file in a separate Quicktime instance. (You may have to change your preferences to allow opening movies in new players.)
- Go to the player with audio and hit “Edit/Select All” and then “Edit/Copy”.
- Go to the player with video making sure your scrub play cursor is at the start and hit “Edit/Add to Movie”.