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CHRISTOPHER PANG
Rigging Technical Artist
Nudge tool
Intro
One of the issues raised by an animator I worked closely with on a game project was that it was time-consuming to move keyframes on the Autodesk Maya timeline, especially when moving large numbers of them at once. In order to speed up their workflow, I decided to create a tool too assist them with this. The main objectives for this tool were to make it a simple and easy to use, as well as use as little screenspace for the user interface as possible.
Main tool features:
- Buttons to move keyframes to the left and right on the timeline.
- Incremental value option to move all selected keyframes by a set amount of frames.
- Buttons to add and remove inbetweens between keyframes.
Model: Military Tank, Vaaho Animators
Development process
I began the project by listing out and prioritizing the requirements for the nudge tool. The main targets for me to hit were an easy-to-use format, and a small area of space for the user interface. Once I had my objectives, I created a shell of the tool to lay out the buttons I wanted to create.
I then took the functions for moving frames to the left and right as the first functions I would create and test. Once I had completed my first pass on them, I moved on to the adding and removing inbetween buttons. At this stage, I realized that one challenge I had not considered was that animators sometimes highlight a section of the timeline to move all at once, instead of just the keyframes on the current time. I had to rework the script I had written to include what to do if a multiple times were selected on the timeline.
Once these two functions were created, I worked with the animator on my team to get feedback on the tool's functionality, as well as it's UI and ease of use. Through this testing, I also learned that it would be very useful to move frames in incremental amounts, as there were situations where frames would need to be moved a lot, and it was tedious to constantly press the move button for every single frame.
After several rounds of iteration, I arrived at the final version of the tool. The main visual changes made throughout this process included reductions in the overall size of the tool, addition of colors to help with visual clarity, and changes to the layout of the buttons on the tool to help with pressing different buttons in quick succession.
Iterations of the Nudge tool.
Areas to improve on
One of the main areas for me to work on would be the logic used to move a range of keyframes at once. I could not find a clean method of scripting a selection of multiple frames, which meant that I was running into an issue where the selected frame range would not change after I had moved the keyframes inside that range to different frames. I would want to find a more efficient method of re-selecting the frame range after the keyframes had been moved, both for visual clarity and so that the animator could also continue to manually adjust the frames that they had selected even after moving them with the tool.