Hey Maya users!

I'm a 3D character animator with 12+ years of experience, and for the past 6 months I've been working on a few Maya tools in my spare time.

I originally started building them to make some of my daily animation tasks easier, and somehow ended up with four different tools :)

Here's what I've been working on:

Advanced Bézier Arc Editor – Edit and reshape motion arcs directly in the Maya viewport using interactive Bézier handles.

HandForge – A library of 48 hand poses that can be reused across different compatible character rigs.

BreathForge – Generate procedural breathing animation with customizable presets, speed, and intensity on a separate Animation Layer.

FrameFlow – Import video references directly into Maya, sync them with the timeline, and retime them using Reference Time Warp.

I've been using these tools in my own animation work, but I'd really love to hear what other Maya users think.

Are there any features you'd find useful, or things you'd approach differently?

I've attached some screenshots of the tools. You can also watch the actual Maya demos on my YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@animtoolsL

Thanks for checking them out!

i know maya has one built-in but i used it in the past and when it was time to animate it kinda blew up in my face. i probably just suck at it but if anyone has any tips or auto-riggers to help me out that would be greatly appreciated!

https://reddit.com/link/1xhdqxx/video/7ib0kz8kp4yh1/player

So working on a school project for my rigging class in Maya, having issues with what seems to be verts pulling everywhere, I have tried Component editor and it doesn't seem to work when I value it to 1 or 0. Please be patient with me, Maya rigging is hard for me. Any help would be appreciated

Been fiddling with this but can't seem to make it look right. She looks like she's jumping moreso than smoothly running. Also I don't get what a good run animation cycle is supposed to look like - making it more like an irl running video looks too stiff, but the run animations I could find have so much variation between them that i dont know what to reference.. :/

About a year ago, I started working on a custom Asset Browser for Maya, but never got around to continuing development. I'd love to pick it up again and turn it into something genuinely useful!

I'm looking for collaborators who are interested in working on similar tools, exchanging ideas, and learning from each other. If that sounds interesting to you, I'd love to hear from you! Feedback and suggestions are also very welcome :-)

And if there already are open source tool that is perfect I'd love to hear about it.

I don’t know if it has to be very detailed or what

It's been many years since I've used Maya, aside from the multitude of amazing plug l-ins, terminology adjustments, and complete 180 of difficulty in understanding the guide books, things have relatively been manageable to understand/refresh on. I aim to create my own feature animation short film but would appreciate to hear the pipelines others have used. At the moment I am just creating generic objects and eventually will export to Zbrush for texturing but I will be utilizing other software I've never used before and strictly use Z-brush for character sculpting. The auto-rig feature is nice and I understand the animation for facial expressions/speech alignment to audio is extremely tedious. But what software do you prefer for designing environments?

Sometimes when I am rigging or even sculpting, those time extensive moments I always get this aching feeling that i could be studying other avenues in life. For some reason it always comes up after realizing how much time has elapsed of me being hyper focused. What do you tell yourself in these moments to keep yourself from getting discouraged?

Sunday afternoon Project.

Took About 3-4 hours.

really fun 2 second clip, After doing a few longer shots and trying to get Showreels worked on it's nice to just sit down with a little no pressure shot.

Excited to share my latest personal project - a combat finisher animation built in Unreal Engine 5!

During some downtime between projects, I decided to dive deeper into the 3Cs (Character, Camera, Controls) and challenge myself to create a cinematic finisher that seamlessly transitions from gameplay and back again.

Beyond the animation itself, this was a great opportunity to get more hands-on experience with Unreal Engine 5, exploring retargeting, Motion Matching, Contextual Animation, Motion Warping, camera integration, and even setting up cloth simulation for Hornet's outfit. It was a fun challenge, especially getting all these systems to work together!

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. The Vertex Bake Sets group contains tools for working with the storage of precalculated lighting information. Prelight is the first of these tools in Maya.

For a dark, Gothic style, which version aligns better with mainstream aesthetic preferences?

I've got some experience in Blender but this was my first attempt at Maya. It's different but I'm liking it!

Hey y'all! Here's a simple run cycle I worked on. It took me about 3–4 hours of getting back into the groove, dealing with Maya crashes, and having plenty of those "Oh yeaaaaah, that's how it was supposed to work!" moments. XD

Feedback is definitely welcome!

I've been going through this community lately and have felt inspired to get back into animating. It's been my passion for as long as I can remember. That was until the writers' strike happened, followed by... AI. Since then, I've been on a path towards changing careers.

But despite everything, my love for animation never died. I still find myself daydreaming about different shots I could try and bring to life. Unfortunately, getting caught up in my new career path and barely having any time for myself has kept me away from animating, or even opening the software.

Working on this simple run cycle has reignited that fire in me and brought back a kind of happiness I'd almost forgotten I had.

Thank you for taking the time to check out my work! And once again, feedback is always welcome.

I'm hoping this post will serve as a milestone and a reminder to myself to keep updating my animation work whenever I can, no matter how busy life gets.

Have a good day, everyone! 😊

ArtStation : artstation.com/karltourelle13
Instagram : kt3d_rig
Lindkedin : linkedin.com/in/karl-tourelle

Arnold not rendering certain objects

I have an animation involving a skeleton character with floating limbs that I need to render but I am finding that most of the bones (meshes) of the character are not rendering. The rig is one complete individual with the limbs and ribcage parented to the respective joints, the spine and hips as one mesh bound to the spine joints and the skull attached to a controller.

Only the skull and the spine/hips meshes show up in the Arnold render. The render stats of the objects that show up in the render are identical to the ones that do not and they also share the same aiss material so I’m not sure why they do not appear in the Arnold render.

At first I wondered if it’s because the bone meshes are parented to the joints but when unparented they still do not appear in the render as well as when given a new material. I did do a mock up in another file with objects (with aiss materials) parent to joints with an IK handle and they appeared in the render.

If anyone has any advice on how to correct this please let me know.

I use Advanced Skeleton when rigging, and one of its steps is to export the character as an OBJ and import it back. This cleans up the character but also locks its normals, so when I rig and animate it, I get some shading artifacts.

I noticed that if I go back to the original model, unlock the normals, and soften them, the artifacts disappear.

But my question is: Could this cause problems? I've never heard of anyone unlocking and softening the normals before rigging. Could this cause issues down the line? Should I just leave the normals locked?

1 - Arnold render in Maya, 2 - Reference, 3 - Screenshot from Substance Painter

I'm trying to understand what I need to do to have the icing on top of the strudel look more like icing sugar as seen in the reference. I sculpted the model in Zbrush, textured in Substance Painter and am rendering using Arnold in Maya. I'm mostly satisfied with how the powdered sugar fallen on the plate looks but the icing on the plate and on top of the pastry looks like they're not made from the same thing. What do I do here?

Edit: I'm planning to use this as a reusable asset and I want it to look like a layer of icing from any camera angle I choose and with different lighting setups.

Another question: While I was working on the icing fallen on the plate, the shadows were too dark and I decided to use transmission at 0.5 value to reduce the intensity of shadows on it to get it to look how it does now. But now I'm wondering if this a bad approach because it isn't supposed to have transparency at this level. Wouldn't the fact that using a different environment or lighting setup change how it looks make this a bad approach? Do studios avoid using fixes like this?

Hi everyone!
Lately, I've been really deep into developing tools and systems to improve my Maya workflow, and I recently started building my own marking menu using Qt/PySide, with a more modern look.

I've always liked the speed and convenience of marking menus, but I wanted to experiment with a more customizable, modern UI.

I was hoping to find some like-minded people to collaborate with, share ideas or just get feedback :-)

My github is private for now, I would at least like to get some more features in before making it public.

The graph editor that was present in the UI of older versions of Maya is now missing. Is there any way to make it back ?

Heyo! This is a render for a Lighting and Rendering school project that I have been working on, and am currently setting up render layers so that I can have an easier time in post.

My question (that I can’t find a good answer for, though I might not have looked for long enough) is how best to go about isolating shadows onto their own layers? This is mainly so I can remove the shadow cast on the planet by the ship, but also for compositing.

A little more context:

Rendering Using
Arnold, combined with (this is an important part): the legacy render layer system as that was what we have been taught to use as an introduction because it is “easier to wrap your head around.”

Scene Layout
The spacecraft is practically touching the planet to get the blockout composition I want while not making the scene obscenely massive.

Lighting
Primarily lit by a large directional key light from behind the camera that emulates a star. And I have a few area lights to fake extra bounce light from the star and especially the planet. Though it being so close already helps.)

Would it be better to just cut my losses and spend some time to get to know the newer render layer system instead?

Thank you! :)

I was working on my mesh and must've hit some hotkey or rendering preset which made all the geometry turn mushy like this. It didn't go away when I hit undo and I have no idea what to search so I put it here.

Thanks for any help you can give