For Maya 2018, the focus was to address stability, fix bugs and make sure that Maya was in a place where customers didn’t have to worry about crashing – this was our priority for the 2018 release.
Please feel free to continue to share your feedback, and thanks for taking the time to share with us.įor some context, the Time Editor was introduced to add many of the workflows from SoftImage’s Mixer to Maya, not entirely to replace Trax (hence the differences in workflow).
I'm sorry to hear you had such a difficult time using the Time Editor, I empathize entirely. I made mine, hence I am no longer able to submit this as a bug.
What a farce!Īt this stage, the workaround is to "not use the time editor", don't install SP 5 and basically stop paying Autodesk for product updates. The problem still occurred in the same place and parallel evaluation no longer worked correctly with expressions in the scene. The error logs show QT5 initiating the crash because of access violation!Īll of this was done using Maya 2017 SP 4. At the time of crash, there was plenty of GPU and CPU RAM free. Real-world examples using complex rigs fail consistently. Simple examples, test cases work without a hitch. I finally came completely unstuck when I added clip layers, added a few keys and the system crashed with no warning! I have spent the last 3 days trying to isolate the problem. I persisted and gave Autodesk the benefit of doubt due to my inexperience in using this system. The others revert back! In short it takes you approximately 10 times longer to do simple animating tasks using this system. Then look out if you hit the "key menu item" and you currently only have one attribute selected. The "S" hotkey does nothing! The only way to key is to select the attributes again and then select the layer and then hit the menu item for key. It is so counter intuitive to have to look back in the time editor to see what the original keys are and then back to the timeline and see what is keyed on that layer. When you are working on an instance of the clip by adding a layer, you can't even get a simple feedback of what is going on in the timeline as it shows only the layer you are working on. I have to define selection sets to mimic this functionality. Not being able to define "characters" and select on that basis from the drop-down boxes on the bottom of the screen is again something huge which is missing.
Asking people to edit the source using the graph editor rather than posing using autokeys just shows a complete lack of understanding from the developers of what animators have to do day-to-day. Not providing the functionality to directly edit source clips in the timeline is so counter intuitive. Unfortunately, beyond basic "blending" of clips, the time editor is riddled with shortcomings. It really looks like the "pose" functionality is an afterthought. cycles and save them as clips and even export them. I managed to animate some walk, run, etc.
If you try to use this from scratch on characters where you have carefully set up the minimum keys and carefully set tangents to give the best animation performance, you will be bitterly disappointed.
That is with animation keys placed on every frame. If you look at the published tutorials online you will notice that people are giving only examples of using this new functionality to work with characters with mocap data. With the push from Autodesk to abandon the TRAX editor I felt that it was time to get updated. Up to now, I have been using the TRAX editor with it warts and all, since Maya 5.0. On my most recent project I took the plunge and explored the time editor.