What's New in Animation

Draw on your screen with virtual marker using the new Grease Pencil tool.

Traditional animators who still mark up the screen with dry erase marker can now sketch with the clean and non-destructive Grease Pencil. Click to add a Grease Pencil frame in the timeline, then start drawing.

Use Grease Pencil sketches to compose shots or backdrops, block out poses, and sketch lines of action. Create a sequence with multiple sketches at different frames and use Window > Playblast to create a quick, animated movie of your sketches.

• Draw on the scene view with Grease Pencil
• Grease Pencil overview
• Grease Pencil Tool

Watch: Draw on the scene view with Grease Pencil

Character sets support more complex characters

Take advantage of nonlinear animation workflows with less time spent on character setup with improved support for HumanIK characters and custom rigs in character sets. Character sets now handle rigs with multiple roots, and rigs using a blend of IK/FK solving. (See also Animating HumanIK characters in Trax.)

Improved clip matching

Matching poses and aligning clips is even more streamlined in Maya 2014, with updated Match Clip Options. Maya now recognizes the root object(s) within your character set, eliminating the requirement to manually specify an offset object as you match clips.

• Match poses and align clips

Display more poses with clip ghosts

By default, clip ghosts show poses from the first and last frame of the clip, as well as the trajectory of the animation. You can now adjust the ghost attributes to display additional poses, and show or hide the default poses and trajectory.

• Change the display of clip ghosts

Easily view tracks for all character sets

A new Trax Editor menu item View > Frame All Scene Clips quickly sets the track view area to show all clips for all character sets in the scene.

• Set the Trax Editor view

Introduced in Maya 2013, the Retime Tool is now even easier to use with several improvements based on feedback from users. Change the timing of key movements in your animation sequence by placing and dragging the intuitive retime markers.

See Retime animation and Reposition retime markers for updated information about manipulating retime markers.