THE ANZOVIN ONION SKINNER

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1 THE ANZOVIN ONION SKINNER USERS MANUAL Maya Versions: 2011-Present Design: Raf Anzovin and Brian Kendall Programming: Brian Kendall Testing: David Andrade, Krzysztof Boyoko, Yasha Peiros, Robert Pellerin, Josh Perry & David Russell Documentation: Morgan Robinson Copyright by Anzovin Studio, Inc. All rights reserved

2 INTRODUCTION The Anzovin Onion Skinner is an animation tool for Maya 2011 and later. It lets you see previous and subsequent frames of your animation, similar to the effect traditional animators achieved with tracing paper. In traditional animation, you can draw your character's pose while seeing their other poses, which gives you a visual preview of the motion you're creating. In comparison, CG animation makes you create poses while being unable to see what your other poses look like. It's like animating blind. By showing hardwarerendered versions of your character's poses, the Anzovin Onion Skinner brings the power of true onion skinning to Maya. Like all of our tools, we made it because we wanted to use it ourselves. We hope you find it as useful as we do. -The Anzovin Team

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INSTALLATION 4 USING THE ONION SKINNER 5 ONION SKINNER OPTIONS 9 NUMBER OF FRAMES 9 OPACITY 9 COLOR 9 WORKING WITH AOS SETS 10 SETTING THE DISPLAY QUALITY 12 SETTING CAMERA OPTIONS 13 USING THE AOS SHELF 14 TROUBLESHOOTING 15 SUPPORT 16

To load the plugin, navigate to and select: Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager Click the "Loaded" checkbox next to AnzovinOnionSkin.

4 INSTALLATION The Anzovin Onion Skinner is a plug-in for Maya. Once you've installed it, you'll need to use Maya's Plug-in Manager to load it. You'll also need your serial number, which you should receive within 24 hours of placing your order. To load the plugin, navigate to and select: Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-in Manager Click the "Loaded" checkbox next to AnzovinOnionSkin.py. You'll be prompted to enter your serial number. Once you've done that, you'll probably want to check "Auto Load" as well, so that you won't need to reload the plug-in every time you restart Maya.

5 USING THE ONION SKINNER Once the Anzovin Onion Skinner is installed, you'll find a new set of icons on your Shelf, under a tab called AnzOnionSkin. Click the last (rightmost) icon to open the Onion Skinner Control Window.

First, you should decide whether you want to create onion skin for your entire animation, or for a range of frames: Using a smaller range will result in a faster initial generation of the onion skin,

6 First, you should decide whether you want to create onion skin for your entire animation, or for a range of frames: Using a smaller range will result in a faster initial generation of the onion skin, but unless your animation is quite long, you'll probably just want to use the default of "All frames. Select the geometry you want to have onion skinned, then click the "Set Preview Geometry" button. The box next to the button will turn green, displaying the names of the object(s).

The box next to the button will turn green, displaying the names of the object.

7 Next, select the relevant controls whatever has keyframes that control the geometry. You can also select an entire character set if desired. Click the "Set Controls" button. The box next to the button will turn green, displaying the names of the object. Finally, make sure one of your views is from the camera you want to use, and then select that camera in the Outliner. Click the "Set Camera" button.

8 The time slider will now run through the length of your animation as the onion skin frames are generated. When it's finished, they'll be displayed in the view: As you scrub in the timeline, you'll see that onion skin frames appear for each frame on which any of the controls are key-framed. The Anzovin Onion Skinner is intended for a pose-to-pose workflow, so it shows you other poses, as opposed to showing onion skins for every single frame. NOTE: You may see a slight pause when you scrub immediately after modifying a pose, since the frames need to be regenerated.

ONION SKINNER OPTIONS NUMBER OF FRAMES You can choose how many onion skin frames appear by using the "Display frames forward" and "Display frames backward"

"Far opacity" sets the opacity for the "farthest" frame, as determined in the previous step.

9 ONION SKINNER OPTIONS NUMBER OF FRAMES You can choose how many onion skin frames appear by using the "Display frames forward" and "Display frames backward" slider. OPACITY You may set the opacity, using the "Near opacity" and "Far opacity" sliders. "Near opacity" determines the opacity of the "closest" frame, i.e., the frame immediately before or after the current frame. "Far opacity" sets the opacity for the "farthest" frame, as determined in the previous step. COLOR You can set the colors of the forward and backward frames by clicking on the color swatches for "Backward frame color" or "Forward frame color" and use a color picker.

10 WORKING WITH AOS SETS You can create a new onion skin set by choosing the "New Set" button. This will create a new onion skin set. You can then set its geometry, controls, and camera to generate new onion skin frames. Note: A second onion skin set shares the colors, opacity, and display distances of the first set. These are all global settings.

11 You can rename your onion skin sets to help keep them organized this is particularly helpful in scenes with multiple characters. In the column of buttons next to the "Current onion skin" selection box, choose "Rename Set." You can also hide the current onion skin set using the "Hide Set" button. The onion skin frames will disappear, and the "Hide Set" button will become the "Show Set" button, enabling you to unhide the frames.

12 SETTING THE DISPLAY QUALITY You may have noticed that the onion skin frames are low-res. You can choose their quality level by clicking the "Set Render Quality" button. Higher quality frames will be less pixelated, but will take longer to render. This will cause a more noticeable blip when you start scrubbing after making a change.

SETTING CAMERA OPTIONS The final setting in the Anzovin Onion Skinner Control Window is the "Onion skin frames constrained to camera" checkbox.

13 SETTING CAMERA OPTIONS The final setting in the Anzovin Onion Skinner Control Window is the "Onion skin frames constrained to camera" checkbox. You will usually want to leave this checked, in which case the frames will "follow" the camera as it moves. This means that any camera movement will be represented in your onion skin poses. This isn't ideal, because it makes it harder to match poses, but since we're rendering actual frames, it's necessary unless your only camera motion is panning and zooming, with no translation. In that case, you can uncheck this setting, and your frames will match even when the camera pans. Just be sure there's no translation of the camera at any point, or your onion skins are likely to disappear from view. If your camera does translate but you'd like to get a more stable representation of your animation, we recommend creating a separate, still camera for onion skinning.

14 USING THE AOS SHELF In addition to the Control Window, many of the features of the Anzovin Onion Skinner can be accessed using the buttons in the AnzOnionSkin shelf tab. We've already seen that the right-most button opens the control window. Here are the others, from left to right: Re-renders all onion skin frames. Re-renders the current onion skin frame. Toggle onion skinning visibility. Sets the onion skinning to render the selected objects. This is the same as the "Set Preview Geometry" button in the control window. Sets the selected objects as controls for the onion skin. This is the same as the "Set Controls" button in the control window. Preview frames will be made on frames where any of these controls are keyed. Sets the onion skinning to render using the selected camera. Toggles whether onion skin frames are constrained to their camera. Set onion skin render quality.

15 TROUBLESHOOTING Problem: Frames have weird/missing textures. Solution: The Anzovin Onion Skinner uses Maya's hardware render. Unfortunately, that's not the same thing as what you see in the viewport. The most common problem is that the hardware renderer doesn't handle transparency well. You may need to use different materials while animating to make use of the Anzovin Onion Skinner. You can do hardware renders to preview how your onion skin frames will appear. Problem: Some frames don't line up properly. Solution: This can happen if "Onion skin frames constrained to camera" is unchecked and you've moved one or more keyframes. To fix it, simply use the "re-render frames" button. Problem: Onion skins generated on frames where you don't have a keyframe. Solution: This happens when you use character sets to keyframe, but have defined entire objects as your onion skin controls. The character set is excluding some of the keyed channels on those objects. To fix this problem, either use your character set to define your onion skin controls, or make sure the channels that aren't in your character set aren't keyable. (Visibility is a common culprit here.) Problem: Onion skins don't appear in Viewport 2.0 Solution: Don't use Viewport 2.0 when using the Anzovin Onion Skinner at least for now. We're looking into the possibility of supporting Viewport 2.0 in future versions.

16 SUPPORT For any sales-related questions, like "Where's my serial number?" For technical support, please visit and fill out a support request or our support team: support@anzovin.com. When requesting support via , please include relevant information: platform, OS version, and Maya version. Please be as specific as possible when describing the problem, and attach any files displaying the issue.

THE SETUP MACHINE FOR GAMES

THE SETUP MACHINE FOR GAMES USERS MANUAL Maya Versions: 2011-2014 Rig Design: Raf Anzovin Programming: Brian Kendall and Tagore Smith Documentation: Morgan Robinson Beta Testing: Alex M. Lehmann, George