Trax & Graph Editor

Trax Editor:

The Trax editor is something completely new we were taught this semester and it's a really good edition to animating in maya when you can clip off an animation within a character set and then start a new one. I soon got the hand of using it and it made things a lot easier.

Trax editor is a helpful tool within animation because you’re able to make an animation cycle for a rig and clip it off in to the trax editor where you can save, edit and repeat the animation cycle to get the sequence you want.

You’re able to make many clips and place them in a certain order to create an animated scene for your rig. With the ability to simply activate the keys back in to your main viewport you can just as easily re-animate that cycle to your preference.

This editor is located in the animation editors. Once you have the trax editor opened, select the rigs controller hierarchy that you want to take the animation you’ve created off and put in to a clip in the trax editor.

Then under the character menus, select ‘Create Character Set’.  Next in the trax editor window select ‘Create’ an ‘Animation Clip’. Name your clip something relevant so you can easily recognise it if you have many clips all loaded in the trax editor.

After creating the clip it should appear within the trax editor as a little block, showing you how long the animation is. You can export this clip and save it somewhere so you have that as a separate file.

This will take the key frames off the rig and save them in the clip. To re-activate these clips on to the timeline, simply right click on the clip within the trax editor and select ‘Activate Keys’.

You can blend two different clips together to create a fluid movement from one animation cycle to another. This can be done by going to ‘Create’ and then ‘blend’. As well as blending two clips together you can also split a clip if you only need a certain part of the animation clip. You can do this by selecting the clip and going to ‘Edit’ and then ‘Split’. 

The graph editor is something i've been using for a bit of time and it always helps me a great deal to make my animations look a bit more fluid and smoother. After blocking out the animation i'll always be mostly using the graph editor afterwards to give the animation a polished look about it.

Graph Editor

Trax Editor