Tip of the Week: Troubleshooting Audio

Okay, let's test your troubleshooting skills:

You've brought an audio clip into Maya, but you can't hear it when you playback your scene. Your speakers are on. Your computer's audio settings are normal. There's nothing wrong with the audio file, and you can see the waveform in the timeline. You right click on the timeline to make sure that the proper audio node is activated, and it is. To make matters even weirder: when you scrub in the timeline, you can hear your audio scrubbing, but when you hit the play button, there's no sound. What's going on?

If this has happened to you and you found yourself pounding your desk in frustration, don't be discouraged. It happens to a lot of people. The first time I ran into it, I was completely stumped.

The solution:

Open up your scene preferences and make sure your timeline playback is set to "real-time." If you have it set to "play every frame" or some other setting, Maya will let you hear the audio when you scrub but not on playback. Once you change it back to real-time, your audio should play just fine.



On a side note - audio files can slow down your scene a bit if you're working on an older computer. The best workaround is to narrow your range slider to as short a time-span as you can. It helps quite a bit.

Oscar Nominations

Here's the rundown on this year's Oscar nominations for Animation and VFX.


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
WALL-E

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
La Maison en Petits Cubes
Lavatory - Lovestory
Oktapodi
Presto
This Way Up

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man


WALL-E also picked up nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing, Best Sound Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song.

In the running for Best Foreign Film is Waltz With Bashir, the animated documentary from Israel.

New Location

I'm happy to say that revisions went smoothly and that Set Driven Key is back up and running.

Due to some technical issues, I have to change the way that I'm hosting the blog. From this point forward, Set Driven Key will no longer be hosted at the old URL. You can find it here at www.setdrivenkey.com.

I will keep copies of all the old posts in their original location indefinitely to keep any links on external sites from breaking, but all future posts will be made at the new address. If you subscribe to the blog via email or news aggregator, you may need to re-subscribe to the feed at the new location.

New tips and news are on their way. Stay tuned...

Renovations

Set Driven Key will be undergoing some major renovations over the next couple weeks. I'm in the process of upgrading to some of the more current blogger features, and it's going to take some time to get everything back in order. You may notice some errors between now and then, but I'll try to keep everything working as best as I can. I'm hoping that when it's all done, the blog will be easier to navigate and use. In the meantime, thanks for your patience.

Tip of the Week: Full Screen Workflow

For some tasks in Maya, it's nice to have as much monitor space as possible. You don't always need to have all of the Maya menus and other GUI showing. For instance, there's not usually any reason to display the time slider or range slider while modeling. If you don't use the shelf, you don't need it hogging screen space, etc.

Ctrl + spacebar toggles all UI elements, turning your workspace into a full screen view. If you're comfortable with the hotkeys and marking menus, this is a great way to work on tasks such as modeling and mapping, giving yourself as much monitor space as possible. It's also great for playing back character animations. Just toggle off the UI elements and use alt + v to start and stop playback. (See the two Tips of the Week on timeline navigation).



If you have a small monitor, it's pretty important to learn to work with minimal GUI to keep from squinting all the time. But even with a larger display, it's nice to get the most out of your workspace. Next time you find yourself struggling to select a bunch of tiny vertices on a crowded mesh, give it a try.

Year of the Pumpkin