Pasting Keyframes
 

OK wise ones here's a question for you. I am working on some animation cycles which require identictal keyframes at the start and the end of the cycles so they cycle smoothly. Now when I use A:M (that other program I use) I click on say the wrist locator copy the key frame for it move to a new frame and paste the same keyframe - wonderful.

I have tried selecting channels in Maya and copying and pasting but it doesn't have the same effect... At the moment I am down to manually typing in the figures to make starting and ending keyframes match up.

Any ideas?

You can copy and paste keyframes in the time slider (just right-click the red keyframe ticks). Or you can copy/paste in the dope sheet and the graph editor.

I dunno you spend sixty bleeding quid of a book from Alias and they don't tell you how to do sumink as simple as this init!

fanx Dannyngan, i'll try it out tommorrow!

You can also middle mouse drage from your current postion and them key the keys that way...

Kurt

I didn't quite catch that mate :)

Do you mean that you can click on a keyframe and middle mouse drag it in the time slider to a new poistion?

Only it don't seem to quite work...

YA say you like the keys at frame 1 and you want them to be the same at frame 24 for a cycle go to frame one then middle mouse drag over to frame 24 and then key all the postions or hit s key if you have a character set.

Yep, middle mouse dragging on the time slider will progress the frames without actually progressing the animation. Very useful!

OK keyboys answer me this then. I am used to Animation:Master and it has a feature for pasting mirrored keyframes. Say you have you first frame of a walk cycle, you select the model then go to the middle of the cycle and PASTE MIRRORED it flips the characters stride. Then you copy frame one again and paste it at the end of the cycle and your getting there (kinda blocks out the motion).

The other feature it has ( I have looked at Mayas keys option boxes but I don't quite understand them yet) is the ability to paste in a hierarchial fashion. Say you have a control for the whole model (pelvis) and some for the hands. Now you could copy a frame and paste, but only want to copy the position of the hands and not the whole (pelvis). Can you make Maya only copy the poistion of the hand and paste that rather than the poistion of the whole model?

I would have thought so but tell me how...

Just select the hamd joints or locater depending on what you used and middle mouse to the wo what key you want to copy say at frame 12. then its just a matter of keying the keys in that postion.

The walk cycle i did in the vip section goes through it all....

Gotcha Kurt! Yeah this is easier like this - like it!

Nice Cloth tutorial btw Kurt, perhaps for part two you could show how cloth animates. I know it looks great when done but it's the doing of it that's a bastard....