Hi guys.
In our studio predominantly use 3ds max though we do support Maya. One feature of our 3dsMax pipe uses Note tracks/Note Keys. For those that are not familiar with note tracks they are custom chunks of text that can be assigned to individual frames of an animation.
We use these notes to trigger special effects, sounds or python scripts that need to be timed with the animation. One problem, we haven’t figured out an equivalent way of doing this in Maya.
Does anyone know if there is an equivalent way of adding an annotation to a particular frame of a Maya animation? Or can you think of an alternative approach.
you can grab the current frame or time. You can do this with expressions or nodes.
example.
if (time < 2)
{
Balloon.translateY = 0;
Balloon.scaleY = time * 0.6;
}
else
Balloon.translateY = time - 2;
that’s not mine. Got that from the help docs. There is also a time node in maya that you can connect into other nodes if you want to do it with condition nodes.
There is a annotate command you can use to get quick text to pop up in your scene and it has visibility, which can be key framed to just make it pop up at the correct frame.
The only thing is that the annotate has to be attached to an object.
example:
create a box, name it VFX1
MEL: annotate -tx “Trigger effect xx here” -p 1 1 1 VFX1;
the -p 1 1 1 is the xyz location in world space that is the center of the text.