How to Animate with the Graph Editor

[@SirWade]

Do you use the graph editor? What do you struggle with most, and what would you like me to talk about in the upcoming Advanced Graph Editor Workflow video?? :)

[@BluePixelAnimations]

I struggle the most with keeping track of all keyframes. After a while it becomes such a big mess of lines😂

[@leowalt393]

I animate key pose according to my reference, but i still thinks the timing is to fast and it doesn't present "slow in slow out". Set a lot of keys but still not good at all. I really need to figure out the graph editor😂😂😂

[@mojito248]

I get confused on what is happening and where I'm going wrong. Giving demonstrations and examples on common mistakes ppl make on the Graph Editer & how to solve them would be awesome! ☺️👌🏼

[@ewawojtaszek5504]

How to proper clean up the shot with graph editor.

[@asacadaani7814]

i'm one of ur supporters😍 from somaliland

[@Je11yRo11]

my college animation teacher told us the graph editor was more or less optional and my career has been on the ground ever since. I had to learn most of this myself and I'm glad you're here to save everyone else from my struggle

[@SirWade]

Omg, your professor is insane! The graph editor is so important!!! Well I'm stoked you found this video and that I was able to help a bit :)

[@RealGoOhm]

My tutor atm didn't even know what the graph editor was, is the same age as me and has never worked in any industry even close to what he teaches now. His only game being a really basic "simulator" style game. Really annoys me when I try to ask him about animation and he has no idea and none of the other tutors even touch games development.

[@kendarr]

@@RealGoOhm gosh, this makes me feel a lot better knowing that I'm having a terrible time trying to get into the industry and I at least know what a graph editor is

[@RealGoOhm]

@@kendarr XD yeah trust me if you study even some outside of class you'll be way ahead of everyone else in the class. I'm like 24 so I've had ample time to self teach but others don't have that chance then think they chose the wrong course when in reality they just have a shit set of tutors. One of mine only taught us risk assessments for this IT service delivery exam and nobody in the class got better than a near pass yet they don't investigate him or remove some of the responsibilities he has instead they just allow him to teach the other exam too. Education in the UK is a joke it's no wonder we are lacking behind in terms of IT

[@thechillpixelone5691]

thats wrong my professor said its the most important thing once you understand it your work gets easy

[@ercesubas16]

Well I just learned more stuff than a month spent in 3d class... Thanks!

[@lewisjohnson4447]

Yea i spent 3 months and learned more in this 1 video

[@decimo5310]

​@@lewisjohnson4447 Same here.... I'm just glad he made this video . The graph editor makes so much more sense now.

[@Jessicanimation]

Ever since I began my character motion class I'm learning more from KZbin than the class lectures. My instructor even encouraged it.

[@vladartiomav2473]

Thanks a lot for this comprehensive tutorial! Btw, for those of you who want to resize the tangents and struggle to do so, there is an option in preferences under Settigns >Animation > Default tangent weight. By default it's set to "Non-weighted Tangents", but if you want your handles to be freely resized, you need to set this to "Weighted Tangents". Or optionally if you prefer to work with default tangents, but have some weighted tangents when you need it, you can convert a keyframe tangents by going in the Graph Editor Menu > Curves > Weighted Tangents. This will unlock the selected keyframe to freely resize its tangents.

[@sonario6489]

I just wanted to come back to this video to say thank you so much for all of your videos. You've given people like me the power of the Graph Editor, and animation in general. You're a 10/10 teacher and animator who should have his channel be required learning for any character animation class.

[@yarugatyger1603]

Came here from my animation teacher :D she went to the same animation school as you 2 yrs later and says your the boss when it comes to youtube tutorials...found quite a few helpful ones so far :D/

[@ProfKisuto]

This is a killer explanation. Even as someone who has been professionally animating for years, I still sometimes get lost when I'm doing complicated rotations and feel myself eyeballing the arcs / overlaps in them. At this point I tend to stick to step and make lots of keys to rely less on the graph editor - only using it for clean up. I would LOVE to see a super advanced graph editor tutorial!

[@maikymadnesskreation8646]

Been following for years this channel is underrated I blame the algorithm

[@castermadness]

I'm extremely grateful this video exist because how easy it is to understand your explaination. The worst part about being a college student for animating in maya is that my teachers don't even brought up this kind of idea for explaining how the graph editor works in more of a simple term. We as beginners, WANT to learn what tool does and what use it could be for us to animate. Keep in mind that i PAY for the college courses and this makes me sad this video explains more than our teachers FOR FREE.

[@cozyraptor7095]

I know this video is quite old, but I've just started to really pursue animation and this Graph has always intimidated me so much. I've always known of its existence, and the broad scheme in which it works, but this video REALLY helped me put a lot of it in perspective. Thanks so much

[@SirWade]

We call that... Timeless Wisdom ;) Haha glad you got a lot out of it!!

[@urboyrachel8964]

Thank you so much for this video!! I’m learning 3D animation in school right now but they aren’t really teaching us the graph editor much yet so we do everything manually with linear. When they do bring up the graph editor from time to time without explaining it at all, I just get really confused. Thank you for posting this! I shared it to many of my classmates so we can understand what the curves actually mean!!

[@yigu4017]

Me too!The school didn't say the principle of the software, which made it very difficult for me when I first started working.

[@vincenzo2634]

@@yigu4017 what school are you attending to?

[@scremmy_draws]

i know this video is old, but i always come back to it. such an amazing explanation!

[@NanoGameLab]

I have one of the best educators on animation around, but sometimes its hard to grasp something the first time around, or if you need a refresher on a subject or subject section. i came across this video looking for the break tangents option, and stayed because your lesson was interesting from the start. great content. thanks for the refresher i actually forgot about a few things in this video that i probably needed a refresher on (ball mechanics) i believe really good bouncing ball skills translate into all animation. love the way you explain things. cheers!

[@maikymadnesskreation8646]

The first video I found that really explain the graph editor the way I needed 👍🙏

[@chandragarber3307]

Wow this is very helpful. I'm more of a visual learner, and am taking computer animation for school. The one thing I have problems with is the Graph Editor. My teacher's are helpful to a point but they really don't go into too much detail on how the graph editor works. So I struggle a lot when I animate. But after watching your instructions and understanding of the graph editor it'll help my animations by a lot.

[@salilphadnis4147]

This is the best explanation of graph editor that I have seen.

[@sarasaga90]

I know all the comments are basically the same, but: you just helped me a lot, and I think I'm learning more with you than with my actual college teachers... thank you so much. I'm just following you everywhere now. XD

[@SpaceMonkiiBob]

I'm in the midst of trying to learn maya, the concept of the graph editor was really challenging for me to grasp, like I understood but I didnt at the same time, this video helped a lot. Thank you! :D

[@alvinl0622]

Hey Sir Wade, seriously thanks so much for your good work, you have no idea how much you have help me with my school work. You deserve wayyy more subs and likes on your videos man. Now off I go to watch your parent constraint video for the fourth time.

[@eualvin]

20:42 hell yeah, amazing video!

[@inuyasha561]

Thanks Sir Wade! this was great. this gave me a whole new look on animation in it's entirety. i hope you do your class next summer. I won't be able to get into it this summer but next year definitely!

[@G1assWater]

some of my classmate didn't even try when making bouncing ball for our assignment and its been going for almost a month now, i already got full mark the first submission so this is getting annoying when i want to learn a new stuff. My lecture had already shown pendulum animation but i'm still in trouble when correcting the graph to make it realistic, i already completed it but i just copy paste it from youtube so i feel like it was plagarism instead of my own work. This video make me realize some of my mistake when changing the graph so i will try it again later when i had time, thank you. Subscribe!

[@MADHATTER22]

wow your videos are real helpful thanks you for this videos i can't believe that you only have 36k subscribers make your way to the million my friend

[@traceymuy1942]

Im learning 3D right now and when my prof showed us the graph editor, I had/ still have no idea what it meant/ how it worked but Sir you have shed some light into the situation! Im still a bit confused but Ill practice more and learn on the way. Ty!

[@kowalewicz2554]

This is gold! I have been watching you for a while now and have finally gotten the chance to study some 3D animation in Maya trough my Master’s degree and MAN are these helpful! I used to watch your videos before I even had a PC, so I just watched them, I couldn’t repeat what you were doing. I’m so happy I can finally follow along T.T

[@abrahamwondafrash7549]

Thanks,Sir Wade Neistadt! even though I use Blender I understand a lot of things and by the way for the blender users...to manipulate the curve you can press "T" for different type of interpolation and "V" for seting different handle types!

[@kaipaschke7244]

This has helped so much! I really wish it was explained this way when I was first introduced to Maya animation

[@aqualust5016]

Outstanding explanation, I needed to see this so much and will refer to it often!

[@prajakta3921]

I was always so unsure about the graph editor and sometimes I just used it according to my intuition. It's so much better to know the technical side of it and thanks for teaching it so well! I hope your channel keeps flourishing! it's the best one with such a cute tutor too :p

[@xandrepearcy449]

Thanks for the Video Wade. It's brillo. I am stuck though.. at 19:00 Wade stretches out the top arc and I have no idea how he does this. First i need to disrupt the curve to break the Autotangent. I don't understand how he just moved out of it; then he dragged the handle and it stretched it out. When i do that it only stretches one side. Bit confused.

[@SirWade]

At the time I’d forgotten to mention that I was set to weighted tangents, and I used middle mouse click to drag that. Check out my latest graph editor video for more details and demos!

[@virtual_intel]

Wish I located this video 3 years ago when I first started with Blender Animation. Yikes you certainly know how to explain stuff really well. Nice tutorial on the subject thanks for sharing your wisdom with us all. It helps for sure!

[@NovaNocturneArt]

I wish I had seen this video when I first heard about the graph editor. I self taught a good portion of this with a ridiculous amount of trial and error, but I still learned a lot more from the video. Thank you for making it!

[@DetectiveLobotomy]

as a professional editor who thought AVID was rough to learn, my head is gonna from MAYA, but it's worth it for my personal project I'm doing. Thankfully there are alot of similarities w AVID and MAYA so it's just learning where the buttons are. Great teaching job, you're def the teacher I've been looking for. By any chance do you have a video where you explain how to use controllers on a rig?

[@iAdrian1997]

Thank you for this video! I more or less understood the graph editor at a simple level, but just was not sure how to really use it. The copy-pasting of keys to keep that same tangent was mind breaking for me, I always drag them to match it.

[@IncognitoSprax]

Took long enough but I found another YT channel to understand this stuff. Mission accomplished!

[@rishabhlaheja7689]

A graph editor tutorial very well explained...please make more teaching tutorials...you are really good at teaching to be honest

[@PixelandFrame2024]

A good toturial,thank you so much. I always had struggle and confused by graph editor in maya.

[@orea104]

Amazing viedeo! I was really confused but this video helped me a lot!

[@noahnoah5239]

this was an awesome video. thank you. your a good communicator - very patient and thorough.

[@cuppaint]

This was so so helpful, thank you! I was lost with my mid term animation and this put me in the right track.

[@eiodelami]

I love your tutorials, they keep me going

[@kingmurder8245]

thank you this was a big help!! I know I still have a long way to go but I'm sure this will help my animations a ton! thank you so much!!

[@filipebefx4140]

You are really great at teaching. Congrats. Even though I do animation for a while, I have learnt a few things here. Thank you

[@sonianosfy3915]

Ottimo tutorial, grazie! Mi vedrò anche gli altri video. Mi piacerebbe un altro sul graph editor dove approfondisci i comandi :)

[@Loveisgrowthh]

Thank you so much for this! I loved the way you explained everything.

[@luckyenam6329]

Learning a lot from your channel Thanks a lot Sir Wade.

[@AorinEnder]

Thank You! And please make more of this tutorials. Next please explain how to add(in that particular case) squash and stretch.

[@enderperez-lopezanimations4103]

This is going to be a very usefull video, the graph editor makes a huge difference in my animations and in some situations saves me time.

[@mojito248]

I needed a tutorial on this so badly!! Thank you so much Sir Wade!! 💛💛☺️

[@mauriciosevilla174]

super helpful and detailed tutorial

[@NoeliaEncarnacion]

Awesome Video Wade I can't wait for your next Graph Editor this really helped and now I have a bit more better understanding on how I can fix my shot. So Thanks a Ton for this

[@HawaiianAnimator]

thank you so much, for some reason the way you explain things are so clear.

[@tonyOvarela]

You really do a great job with this tutorial ! i gonna recommand your video !

[@pixbstudios]

loved the way you explained it bro in a simplistic manner . Thanks

[@natattackz5939]

God Bless You. You are a huge help. I am just starting to learn how to animate in Maya, and I really need to do well in this class. Thank you for your videos! ^-^

[@roshnifernandes6811]

Thanks a lot!! Graph editor is tricky to understand and your tutorial helps a lot...Thanks:-)

[@eiodelami]

13:49 - 14:26 Thanks for the hint!

[@eiodelami]

For me it wasn't the only important hint but the one I love the most. I also dig the horizontal, vertical curve part. And other hints. Maybe because I'm just starting out though

[@skywalker0794]

Amazing video dude! I was struggling with that quite a bit, so thanks a lot! Learned a lot ;)

[@TetoTB]

@Sir Wade Thank you too much for this video and for all videos you are really professional I like your videos and always waiting you next

[@satsukisara]

Thank you Sir! I'll take a notes How to do it section 12:58

[@maisurajariwala]

Thanks! This was so helpful. 😇

[@tenzindala457]

Been liking all ur vids and loving it even though I use Blender 💜.

[@Ellamhm]

I WISH I was lying that my teacher told my class to delete every in-between key in the graph editor and gave no reason but to say, "You want the graph editor to look pretty." This really cleared things up for me. Who knew a ball bounce video could be the key to polishing your complex animation scene.

[@fitzhugh7463]

wow, I definitely disagree with that teacher. every animator has his own workflow and if the end product looks good, nobody is going to see the graph editor so it doesn't really matter. I've seen animators who have absolutely hideous graph editors but their animations look fine. the graph editor is there only for the animator himself.

[@Ellamhm]

@@fitzhugh7463 I completely agree. I just wish I knew about this from the start because the teaching caused disinterest for many students into CG and a disorganized workflow and end result animation. Thanks for understanding😊

[@ShoaibKhan-ux8pd]

Sir, your awesome tutorials really helped me a lot.Sir, could you make some tutorials on the bases of rigging I would like to learn it from tutorials.Thanking you!

[@mitiebh]

Hi sir, thanks for the nice video, I understood the graph editor better with your definition. the question is how to stretch the key?

[@SirWade]

I’m posting a follow up graph editor video in the next couple weeks, but good question! It’s called weighted tangents; I forgot at the time that non-weighted are the default so you have to switch them to stretch handles

[@mitiebh]

@@SirWade great to hear that 🤩 Yeah i search for that i find out what the problem. Thanks again

[@Sportsman134]

Thank you for all the help! That took me pretty long to break down and take notes for some reason but was definitely a huge help. Do you by any chance make these concise tutorials because when you started using Maya, teachers or online tutorials weren't that helpful for you as a beginner?

[@theloniuspoon]

man if this is the quality of instruction i get working at dreamworks for free i need to work at dreamworks just to have a teacher as good you

[@karischan7]

animation curves don't really get the attention they deserve, a lot of times you can animate something with very few keyframes but people don't know and just have a bunch of them instead of working with the curves, great video, thanks to you i'm gonnna try and switch from motion graphics to character animation ♥

[@vaishnaviladdha6831]

Thank you so much for this super informative and helpful vid!

[@TopsonNoble]

Yo Sir Wade, How did you stretched out your curve at 19:11??? Been trying to figure it out but its driving me crazy...

[@yalcin9290]

With weighted tangents turned on, middle mouse drag with the tangent handle selected

[@jamesprakashjc]

Have you ever tried blender? what do you think about it? This video was very helpful. An advanced video about this video would be nice but can you also make a video about what makes a motion natural, and what makes a motion look fake in different situations using examples?

[@rammi_]

I like the most of your tutorial that they are general for all software I use blender and that works just like maya

[@LikeAwesome]

you are very good tutor, thank you!👍

[@Snrub100]

Great tutorial, thanks very much!

[@ukmonk]

Great video thank you!!

[@lessminuteAI]

hello sir Wade u make super explanation for graph editor i never see like this ur super teacher really awesome thankssssssssssssss

[@Yz_Shimrei]

Thank you Sir.. Easy to learn & understand

[@alicecao8113]

This is really helpful. Thank you!

[@kenmarkollano5795]

I'm shocked that this is free. Even other courses didn't explain what the curves mean lol

[@dasorra]

Wonderful! Thank you so much Wade :)

[@the1trancedemon]

well explained. thanks!

[@kawaiidokidoki1764]

you are my hero, thankyou for saving me on my exam TT^TT *insert hallelujah gif*

[@김윤희-y4h]

thanks for great great tips!!!:)

[@ning-enchang8988]

Love your tutorial, you are such an amazing teacher. How did you duplicate the ball evenly like this at 3:51?? Which key did you press??

[@justinvoye8967]

Your looking for Edit, Duplicate with Transform, Shift + D is the hotkey. Funfact: it's the same command/hotkey in Adobe Illustrator.

[@sarazamora8059]

This is soooooo thankful!!!

[@sarazamora8059]

HELPFUL!!! omg lmao

[@elkiechadwick2623]

Thank you so much this is great!

[@MrJJAbrans]

Sir, I was waiting for some like It😀😀😀😀

[@lurker784]

You SAVED my ass from failing Ani II THANK YOU

[@rcp.illustrations]

SUPER HELPFUL

[@MantisDing]

thank you so much~ it is very useful ~

[@vamsikrishna6636]

Great video...... please explain how to find a rotation order in a movement in Gimbal mode... and which rotation mode is easy for animating... Thank u ☺☺

[@SXR123_YT]

That goku and toothless in the background. I see you're a man of quality as well.

[@SirWade]

Indeed, I see you have an eye for the finer things in life

[@SXR123_YT]

@@SirWade great minds think alike.

[@GiuseppeDL]

Hi. On 18:15: how do you actually stretch those keys ? I can't reproduce that?

[@yalcin9290]

With weighted tangents turned on, middle mouse drag with the tangent handle selected

[@rainedt]

can someone please tell how to stretch the spline to make it flatter on top? like what he did in 19:08? what do you press?

[@SirWade]

Ah! I set the curve to weighted tangents and then used middle mouse to extend the tangent weight for the key :)

[@dhell-big2071]

Mr. Neustadt question, how did you stretch it (19:10 min) Thank you

[@SirWade]

Middle mouse button and hold shift if you don’t want it to re-orient :)

[@dhell-big2071]

Thank you 🙏🏻

[@RDD87z]

Is it possible to move any curve while your playback is running so you modify in real time?

[@user-nc9on4bp2o]

Would you mine telling me what is the hotkey for "Go to start of playback range"? and if Maya does not have one, can you tell me how to assign one for it. Thanks.

[@chengzhang7687]

very useful tutorial！thank you～

[@BEPPEJHA]

Do I have to ease in all the key frames one by one? Isnt there a way to ease pose to pose?

[@midnightplum1760]

thank you!