FOR MAYA ANIMATORS WORKING TO A SCHEDULE

13 Production Workflows
That Make You Faster in Maya

You already know the fundamentals. You can hit a good pose. You work in Maya.The thing slowing you down isn't your eye, it's the order you're doing things in.This course is 13 Maya workflows I've used, developed, or picked up over ten years animating in AAA. Each one is built around a specific production problem, and every one works the same way underneath: simplify the problem, test it quickly, then spend your time where the shot actually needs it.They're not hotkeys and they don't involve lowering the quality bar. They're the order production animators work in.Here's why that order matters.

Real production doesn't work like school

School gave you a schedule. A week on reference. A week in blocking. A mentor telling you when the shot was ready to move on.Production hands you a shot Monday and expects something useful in dailies a few days later. No clean gate between stages. Nobody tells you when to move on.So most animators run the school process at production speed. They commit expensive work before the decisions underneath it are made.Production animators work the other way around. They test the timing first, while it's cheap. Then they spend their hours where the shot actually needs them.

Here's the clearest exampleStepped mode is excellent for posing and terrible for timing.When you look at stepped poses, your brain fills in what happens between them. The shot feels more resolved than it really is. Everyone in the review nods. The timing seems fine.Then you spline it, and the shot feels completely different.Now you're fixing timing on top of arcs, overlap, contacts and spacing, all at once. Every change costs more, because there's more work attached to it.I've watched that happen many times in production, including on my own shots. It points at the rule that governs every shot you'll ever animate:A decision is cheap early and expensive late.Make your big decisions while they're cheap, and shots move fast. Make them late, and every note costs you a day.

Why I Had to Figure This Out

My name is Stefan Iverson. I've spent over ten years animating in AAA on The Last of Us Part II, The Callisto Protocol, Marvel's Avengers, and the Tomb Raider series.I mention those credits for one reason: production forced me to get faster.Every project was different, but the pressure was familiar. More gameplay animation than days. Reviews that kept moving. Work that still had to hold up.I couldn't solve that by moving my hands faster. I had to change the way I approached the shot.Some of the workflows in this course came from things I figured out myself. Others came from animators around me. A lot of them were small production habits that made an immediate difference once I started using them consistently.I put the best of those ideas together here.

Animating Faster Doesn't Have to Mean Rushing

When people hear "animate faster," it can sound like the goal is to rush the work or lower the quality bar.That's not what I mean. The goal is to spend less time solving the wrong problem at the wrong stage.That's what the three steps in the lead are for. I call it the Test-First Workflow:

It lets you find out whether an idea works before you've paid for it with a day of posing.The tools available to animators now make every one of those steps faster than it's ever been. Most animators just never learned the workflows that use them.There's another benefit too. Animation is more fun when trying an idea doesn't feel expensive. If I know I can test something quickly, I'm much more willing to experiment, throw out a pass, or try a version that might be better.

What This Changes on a Real Shot

The value of getting faster isn't that every shot suddenly follows a perfect schedule. Production is never that clean.The value is that you get to something useful earlier.Instead of spending two days building poses before anyone can really judge the motion, you show a readable timing idea much earlier. If the direction changes, you have less work to throw away. If the direction is good, you move into the real character with more confidence about the foundation underneath it.Over time that compounds. You finish more shots. You get more repetitions. You have more room to experiment.If you freelance, fewer wasted hours give you more control over your schedule. If you're building a reel, you spend more of your time finishing work instead of endlessly rebuilding the same early decisions.And when a shot isn't working, changing direction stops feeling painful once you have a process for rebuilding quickly.

Here's What Those Animators Are
Saying About These Techniques:

What This Changes on a Real Shot.

The value of getting faster isn't that every shot suddenly follows a perfect schedule.Production is never that clean.The value is that you can get to something useful earlier.Instead of spending two days building poses before anyone can really judge the motion, you might show a readable timing idea much earlier. If the direction changes, you have less work to throw away. If the direction is good, you move into the real character with more confidence about the foundation underneath it.Over time, that matters. You finish more shots. You get more repetitions. You have more room to experiment.If you freelance, fewer wasted hours give you more control over your schedule.If you're building a reel, you spend more of your time finishing work instead of endlessly rebuilding the same early decisions.And if a shot isn't working, changing direction doesn't feel as painful when you have a process for rebuilding quickly.

Introducing:

13 Ways to Animate Fast in Maya

A collection of 13 production workflows I've used, developed, or picked up over more than ten years of working in animation.These aren't hotkey tips. Each lesson is built around a specific production problem: planning, secondary motion, overlap, camera work, retargeting, AI reference and mocap, cleanup, and the other places where a normal workflow becomes slower than it needs to be.Every one of them works the same way underneath. Simplify the problem, test it quickly, then spend your time where the shot actually needs it.

Here's Exactly What's Inside This Course:

#1 Attaching and Auto Overlap

• Learn the most efficient way of attaching objects to each other with BasicOverRig

• Create Auto Overlap in seconds that work with any rig (this is not another tail overlap tutorial)

• Learn to think outside the box when animating limbs

18:00

16:00

#2 Layered Workflow - Basics

• How to simplify and start thinking about everything as a bouncing ball

• Animation Layers Demo for Efficiency

• Graph editor workflow

• Have more control over your rotations usin Aim knots with BasicOverrig

• Get subtle overlap in the spine and head using BasicOverRig

• The Antic- Overshoot- Settle workflow done in the Graph Editor

#3 Motion Distrubution

• The easy and natural way to distribute motion down the body

• Apply this technique to avoid disconnected body parts

07:00

02:00

#4 Auto Overlap

• In this demo I demonstrate how to get free overlap using BasicOverRig

• Apply this to tails, ears, shoulders to get more organic looking motion with Physics

#5 Take Full Control of Your Curves

• Demonstration of I use these old school mel scripts.

• Learn how to take full control of your graph editor curves

05:00

07:00

#6 Animating Fat and Fur

• How to simply animate fat and fur like subtances using space switching and offsetting

• How to borrow motion from different controllers and apply it to other controls

#7 Dynamic Camera Animation

• Stefan's way of animating dynamic cameras.

• Techniques on how to make a handheld camera using animation layers and Aim constraints

04:00

04:00

#8 Pose Exploration Method

• A Short demonstration of using one of my favorite AnimBot Tool on posing and exploring poses quickly for your blockout

#9 Mocap cleanup and Animating Bones

• How to temporary create controllers on Motion Capture data that works for you

• No rig? No problem? Step by step demonstration on how to animate directly on bones

• Motion Capture timing and clean-up demo

• Ideas on using Video to Mocap for better understanding of video reference.

34:00

45:00

#10 Mocap at home

• How to use AI video to mocap tools

• How to retarget Motion Capture to any rig

• Pose enhancement techniques

• How to exaggerate timing

• Technical hurdles you might have working with Mocap and how to solve it.

#11 Pose Sketching

• Plan your shots by with the Pose Sketching method (If you're not into Thumbnailing you can use this to quickly explore ideas)

• Start your planning strong with this pose planning workflow to get feedback

06:00

17:00

#12 Primitive Planning

• Learn how to plan your shots and find the energy using simple objects

#13 Smooth Peel offs with Mocap

• Working with motion capture?

• You will learn how to get better contact points using BasicOverRig and a very special animbot tool

17:00

Wait There's More...

I've Added 3 More Bonus Lectures:

17:00

How To Become a Better Game Animator

• Use this Chrome Extension to become a better game animator

• What old Street Fighter Hand Drawn Animations can teach you about Game Animation

Everything is a Bouncing Ball

• Learn how to animate directly on joints

• Create your own temporary rigs using BasicOverrig Script

• How to simplify the way you think about animation

33:00

1 Hour

Stepped to Polish Full Workflow

• Stefan's unique way of going from pose to pose to polished animation using BasicOverRig scripts.

• Learn How To Polish Each Body Part-- Step by Step workflow tips for each body part

Who This Is For:

This is for animators who already know the fundamentals and feel like the process itself is slowing them down.

ATTENTION!One Thing to Know Before You Buy:

Some of these workflows use third party Maya scripts.I didn't write them and I don't sell them. They're tools built by other people that I use in my own production work because they save real timeyou'll see a couple of the animators above mention basicOverRig by name for exactly that reason.Those scripts are not included with this course.If you want to run those specific workflows exactly the way I demonstrate them, you'll need to buy the scripts separately from their creators. The main one I recommend is around $70 on top of what you pay me.I want you going in with your eyes open on that. Most of the 13 workflows don't require anything beyond Maya. But a few of the fastest ones do use paid tools, and I'd rather you know that now than find out after you've paid me and feel like I hid it.

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