I'm sorry to mention Maya every time but I come from 22 years (!) of character animation using it.
I premise I love Houdini and I've been using it for almost 3 years now, I'm trying to migrate to it for all my work, but I'm experiencing some problems with keyframe animation. I have a lot of questions but these are the first
- One of the thing I do all the time in Maya is copying and pasting keyframes on the timeline. I select the keyframes on the “source” object and copy them, then paste it on the “destination” object timeline. If I do it in Houdini I can paste them only if the destination object is already animated, otherwise keyframes are not pasted.
Moreover I can't understand how they are pasted, I assume they are pasted starting from the frame I choose on the timeline, but they are not, they are in other positions in time; and sometimes not all the keyframes are pasted, only rotations, or only translations.
- I tried to copy/paste in anim editor, but if I copy translate keyframes on one object and paste them on another, the keyframes are pasted on rotations (!)
- If I delete all the keyframes from the timeline or from the anim editor, the channels are not set free as I expect, they remain colored with light green, there is no animation curve anymore, but they are connected to something … another problem coming from this “ghost” animation curve that remains active is that when I delete all the keyframes from an object, it doesn't remain where it is, it's moved in another position, and this is annoying.
- This one drives me crazy … again, coming from Maya I find very useful the shortcuts shift+t to keyframe translations, shift+r for rotations etc. , but they work only sometimes, I thought maybe I have to click inside the viewport and then press shift+t, or maybe on the timeline, but there is no rule, sometimes it works, sometimes not
- This is again only my opinion but, again … coming from Maya … animation editor in Houdini has too many controls that confuse the animator, ease out, ease in, match out, match in, it reminds After Effects curve editor (arghh) … in Maya there are only flat,stepped, linear, spline and weighted tangents, I never needed anything more than that.
- I already talked about this in another post but it's very important for me, there is no way to change animation curves tangent type only for selected keyframes and not for an entire segment or curve.
The typical example is when I animate a camera that has to look it's already moving at the start of the shot, and then slows down and stops at the end of the shot. In Maya I select all the starting keyframes (translate, rotate, etc.) an set them to linear, then select all the last keyframes and set them to flat. Done. In Houdini I have to do it manually for every single keyframe because if I set the keyframes to linear they all become linear.
- This is due to my limited knowledge for sure but … why sometimes on the timeline only some keyframes are visible/exposed ? For example only rotations, only translations, or other ?
Thank you
Ray
