Maya Animation Settings

Before you start animating your shots, you want to make sure that your settings are correct.

There are my primary settings that I set and forget and there are my secondary settings that I change depending on the stage that my animation is at.

• Primary Settings

These settings are changed within the preferences menu in Maya.

Preferences can be accessed in two different areas.

In the preferences menu, you want to change the Time Slider settings to match the image below:

The most important setting you want to make sure you set is the frame rate. This affects how Maya interprets the keys and how many keys comprise a second when you render or playblast your shot and the rate that which Maya is going to play your animation in the viewport. The two key areas in which you are going to change the frame rate are the framerate and playback speed.

• Framerate This will affect the framerate you are going to be animating at and playblasting. You want to set this to 24fps for everything but games which is 30fps.

• Playback Speed This will affect the speed at which Maya will play your animation in the viewport. You want to set that to be the same as your framerate for animation.

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• Secondary Settings

These settings are changed within the preferences menu in Maya. They are changed depending on whether you are working on blocking or if you have progressed to spline.

For blocking you want to be working with Stepped tangents.

For making settings to how Maya sets the type of tangent you are going to make changes to the animation settings.

• Blocking settings

When blocking you primarily want your tangents set to stepped so that doing iteration, timing and posing is easier.

The way you are going to do this in settings is by changing the settings on the default in and out tangent. You are going to change these settings to the following:

• Spline settings

When you have moved on from your blocking and you want to start splining your animation and working on polish, you are going to change the default tangents type.

There are two different configurations you can change the tangent types two. Spline and Auto Mix.

For spline your settings are going to be as follows:

For Auto Mix the settings are going to be as follows:

The difference between Spline and Auto Mix is how Maya interprets the tangent handles. Spline tangents tend to be a bit floaty by default and include a bunch of overshoots. Auto Mix tends to clamp the tangent handles and has a smoother interpolation between keys.

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Important Notes

Maya will not change the tangents of existing animation when you change the settings, that has to be done manually. That can be done by changing the tangents of selected keys.

*Select all the objects that you want to change the tangent types on. Navigate to the timeline and double-click the timeline so it highlights red. Then you will right-click, navigate to Tangents and select your preferred Tangent type.