Brian Pace and Eric Smith of Stillwater Films were looking for a way to speed up character rigging, character animation and other animation tasks for their production, The Terimon Stone, and settled on creating a proprietary toolset for these tasks. Realizing that they had made a product which could be very useful to thousands of other LightWave animators, they released it as a commercial plug-in, and the project has in turn taken on a life of its own, with Stillwater recently releasing version 2 of Maestro, their powerful automation and animation control system for LightWave. NewTek spoke with these two developers about the latest version of this popular LightWave plug-in, as well as their take on developing plug-ins for LightWave.

Where did the idea for Maestro come from?

[Eric] It all started when I was developing character rigs for the film project we're working on. I kept making tweaks to the rig, and often, I would have to rebuild the entire rig from scratch, because I needed to add a new bone, or even just modify the position of a bone. This was before the release of 8.0 and the new bone tools. The rig was pretty complex, and took pretty much an entire day to rebuild, so we started looking into creating a simple script to automate the process.

That was a pretty straightforward process, and now we had a tool that enabled us to rig our characters in a few seconds, instead of a day. So then we started setting up scenes with a few rigged characters. As I mentioned before, the rig was pretty complex. I like to have controls that automate complex moves, as well as having individual controls to get under the surface of that automation if I need it. There were a lot of item shape controls hovering around the character, and with three characters in the scene, it was a complete mess. It got very difficult to tell which control null belonged to which character. It became clear very quickly that some sort of character picker was necessary. We looked into the free CCP, but it had the limitation of only working with one character in a scene. It was multiple characters that drove us to this solution to begin with. We had a hard time figuring out how to set it up. Ultimately, this turned out to be a bit of our own thick-headedness, (who hasn't gotten a plug-in and immediately started playing with it without reading a single word of documentation?) but it got us thinking about creating our own.

In the early stages of building our picker, I started thinking about some of the joystick interfaces built for facial animation, and it hit me that if you were using this picker to select an item, it would be really nice if dragging on the picker could go ahead and move or rotate the item for you. That way, it's just one mouse click and drag, instead of having to jump around the screen back and forth between this picker window and layout. Once Brian figured out this could be done, the idea just exploded from there.

[Brian]  When I first came aboard at Stillwater, Eric had developed a very nice rig for animating characters with as few keyframes as possible.  (I know it sounds a little odd, but I'm serious, he pulled it off.)  Over time, though, his rig evolved.  After a while it became apparent that we were going to have to lock down the rig for the rest of the movie.  Why?  Because we had a number of characters we needed to use this rig with and updating the rig across all of them was time consuming.  We started looking into using LScript Commander to automate the rigging process.  Before long we were using full-on LScript to do it, mainly because it offered us the ability to do if/then statements etc.

After the auto-rigger was developed, we started using Eric's new rig to animate.  After a while, it became apparent that we were spending a good deal of time not only selecting the individual controllers, but also selecting the right tool to use on them.  On top of all that, the controllers that were in place to assist in the animation of the character were starting to get crowded, obscuring the character we were trying to pose.  We needed a way to select these items that didn't involve clicking ever so precisely in the viewport window or by sifting through a number of objects in the scene to grab the right one to move.  We found a plug-in that got us most of the way there.  It drew an image on the screen and provided clickable areas that could be linked to controllers in the scene.  Unfortunately we found the plug-in unintuitive and it didn't take much to make it error out.  By this point, I had enough experience with LScript to take a stab at writing my own picker plug-in.  Shortly after getting a prototype going, Eric had the idea of actually moving the character's controllers by clicking and dragging on the hotspots.  After a little R&D, I worked out how to do it, and everything just snowballed from there.

How many developers are working on Maestro?

[Eric] It's kind of a joint effort between Brian and me, but Brian does all the actual coding. My job is to keep thinking up new ideas that make animating faster and easier, and generally drive Brian crazy.

[Brian] Two. I did all the LScript work. Eric set up the rig and the configs for it.  It's been an interesting development effort because we have philosophies that are nearly opposite of each other! This may sound chaotic, but the reality was that it gave us both a broader perspective to consider while productizing it for the LightWave community.  We had to come up with compromises that left us both satisfied.  And you know what?  We pulled it off. We're both very happy with the final result of Maestro.  That's good news for our customers; it means they won't feel alienated by the workflow changes we're offering.

With this being an internal tool, what made you decide to go public with it?

[Eric] When we experienced how much having this kind of control interface made animating not only faster, but much more enjoyable, we figured we wouldn't be the only ones who would love to have a tool like this. It seemed like a good idea to share it. It was a bit nerve-wracking at first, because we just didn't know if the concept would be embraced, or if the community would bash it as a gimmick or something. Fortunately, the response has been really positive.

[Brian] We have very ambitious goals for the movie we're working on.  We're aiming to get a lot of animation done in a very short amount of time.  When we started developing tools to speed up the work flow, and when it really started to look attainable, we realized Maestro would be valuable to a wide range of artists. Eric and I both had experience setting up sliders and control nulls in order to simplify control of an item in the scene.  By the time we were deciding whether or not to make Maestro public, it was plainly clear that setting up the hotspots was much easier and quicker than setting up the sliders or control nulls with the added benefits of 2-axis controls and the ability to 'reset' the hotspot to a default value. 

When Maestro was first released it got a lot of attention from the LW community. What's new and cool in version 2.0?

[Eric] Version 2 is really a big upgrade. Going back to what started this whole thing, every feature we put in is an idea we come up with while we're actually animating. Any time I'm animating and I find myself doing too many repetitive steps, or something is just not as easy or smooth as I'd like it to be, I work out what would make the process easier and faster.

Multi-layered hot spots take the idea of controlling Layout items through a joystick style interface to a whole new level. Now it's possible to control several items with one mouse move. It takes a little getting used to, but it really speeds up animating. Imagine being able to move and rotate an object in all three axes in one mouse move, or positioning an IK hand goal in X Y and Z, as well as pointing the elbow and pointing the hand, again in one mouse move.

Pose hot spots give you the ability to slide an entire character (or whatever part you want) from it's current pose to a saved pose. Imagine morph mixer, but for layout items instead of vertices of a mesh.

The most visible new feature is the keyframe editor. This is a centralized dopetrack/dopesheet that allows you to totally customize your keyframe editing environment. This is not to say anything negative about LightWave's native tools, but current methods available to edit keyframes just don't have all the features you need in one spot. What we've done is to create a keyframe editing environment that puts all the tools you need right at your fingertips, so you spend your time getting into the animation workflow, not jumping around from window to window to get a simple task done. We've also added some special custom tools that are really valuable to character animators, like creating hold keys that automatically set the tension of the curve to 1, so there's no sliding due to curve interpolation.

[Brian]  Maestro 1 was about quickly setting up your character and posing it.  Maestro 2 was about speeding up the actual animation process.  Our approach to this problem was to watch where we were spending our time and see what we could do to streamline the process.  The result? We now have a customizable dope track which allows you to move, stretch, and 'dragnet' keys.  You can save motions to a file and load them into another character.  You can save poses and activate them via hotspots.  (Wonderful for lip-sync, btw...)  One of my favorite tools is the Pos/Rot/Sca slider.  You can select a few keys and click and drag on the Pos [X] button, and all of the X values will start moving.  This greatly eases tasks such as simply shifting your character over to the right.  We dramatically reduced the need to go to Graph Editor or Scene Editor while animating, and that's resulted in a nice little time savings for us. 

How does Maestro differ from other auto rigging tools for LightWave?

[Eric] The really important point I'd like to make here is that Maestro goes so far beyond just auto-rigging. I think there's a misconception out there that rigging is the primary function of Maestro, and that the control panel is just another quick picker. The truth is that the controller, along with the keyframe editor, is a really revolutionary control system for anything in LightWave. You can set up the controller to help animate anything, not just characters. And honestly, even if you really liked another rig, using the Maestro controller to animate that rig would still offer all of the benefits speed and efficiency.

That being said, I personally think that the rigs we provide with Maestro are really powerful. There's a lot of automation, which means you can create complex motions really easily, and with just a few controls. But that doesn't mean we've taken control away from the animator. You can still control every individual aspect of the character when you need to.

[Brian]  Well, this question is a little difficult to answer.  Maestro's primary feature isn't auto-rigging.  Don't get me wrong, Maestro's great as an auto-rigger. Not only is the rig wonderful to animate with, but we also provide a means for somebody to develop their own customized rig that can be easily applied to any character.

 As a product, however, Maestro is a different animal.  The hotspot controller is easily the star attraction with this package.  Think about what it's like to animate in LightWave.  First, you have to select your item.   This involves making sure your viewport is already rotated to the proper perspective to click on it.  Then you have to select the proper tool (move, rotate, scale).  Then you have to click and drag, making sure not to accidentally select something in the process.  It doesn't take very long for this process to become very tedious.  Maestro's controller removes all these steps down to a single click and drag.  The hotspots are drawn over an image of the character so you have an intuitive sense of what that hotspot does.  When you click and start dragging, that item then starts moving or rotating, instantly.  It doesn't matter where your viewport is looking.  It doesn't matter what tool you already have selected.  It's there, configured, and ready to go.   The benefits don't just end there, though.  Having the control panel off to the side meant that we no longer have to orbit the character with a lot of little controllers intended to control various aspects of the pose.  Very clean.  Boy, I Iove that.  Then, when you find yourself doing repetitive motions over and over and over again, you can create a hotspot specifically for the sake of doing that. Eric recently did one where he had to animate the moving parts of a machine.  He just created a couple of hotspots to control the more animated bits and was off and running. 

Maestro 2 takes this a step further by taking whatever hotspots you have selected and automatically showing their keys in the Dope Track below.  You can even add tracks so that you can have specific items on those tracks.  I've found that useful as I like that I can sync up the motion of a character to when his feet hit the ground.  Being able to just see that at a glance is just plain wonderful. 

So, to answer the question, Maestro's different because at a glance you can see what your character is up to, and you can adjust the pose (or the timing of the pose) without having to reorient your view. 

So a user who wanted to use their own rig with these tools could do so?

[Eric] Definitely. The fact is our rigging process is really more of a macro executer, so you can automate any series of LightWave commands that you want. Rigging a character is a great application of this concept, but I've got a macro to take a new scene, change the view to "Double Horizontal", set the camera resolution, and a few other setup chores. So when I create a new scene, I just hit one button, and my scene is ready to go.

Because of this macro approach, it's really easy to edit the rigs, or build new ones from scratch.

What productions have used or are currently using Maestro?

[Eric] Well, there is our own of course. We're working on a feature length all-CG animated film called The Terimon Stone. It's a sci-fi adventure set on an alien world.

Maestro was also used in the DAVE school short film, Dragonfellow.

Dale Campbell, of Positive Productions Plus, is using Maestro for a 45-minute animated kid's video.

There's one other very high-profile project using Maestro, but we've been sworn to secrecy.

What are the top three reasons an animator would be interested in this tool?

[Eric] The number one reason would be speed. We've stripped away so much redundant mouse clicks and back-and-forth, that I've been animating at a rate of 30 seconds a day for one character.

The second reason is connected to the first. When you have to break away from animating and focus on clicking around trying to select items, change transform modes, or navigating through window after window to get at the channels or keyframes or whatever else that you're looking for, it can really break down the creative process. Not to get off track here, but one of the things I really love about modeling in LightWave is that I can get into a groove, where I'm just pushing polys around. The interface doesn't get in my way, and I don't have to go through 10 difference steps to do a simple task. Everything is right at my fingertips. That's how animation should be. You shouldn't have to worry about anything but your character. With Maestro, that's what you get, and it makes your animation work better, not just faster, because you can mentally get into that creative space where you're just moving the character around, and it's that simple.

I think the last reason would be the sophistication of the rig. One of the luxuries I had when designing the rig was that I could justify spending a lot of R&D time making it work really well. When you've got to get 30 seconds of animation due in two weeks, you can't spend six months developing a rig for that job. But because our goal is 90 minutes or more of animation, it's worth it to invest some serious time getting the rig to really work. I've had some good ideas that didn't work out the first few times, and I would have just abandoned them if I was working on a short term project. But instead, I kept at it, because I knew it would be worth it. That extra effort really paid off in a very powerful rig that users can apply to their characters with a few mouse clicks.

• They can streamline the interface to their character.  (This includes creating extra hotspots or LSM files for the sake of
• making repetitive steps less tedious.
  
• They'll love the Dope Sheet we've added.  Character keyframes at their fingertips.
  
• They can easily create their own rigging file to suit their own needs. Want to add a Null? The command is AddNull NullName. Want to convert Skelegons to Bones? The command is SkelegonsToBones. Very simple, very direct, and it's based on LScript Commander so there's instantly a place for reference.
  

What are some of the future plans for this tool?

[Eric] The next step for me is to really focus on making the time aspect of animation faster and easier. Real-time capture is sort of the holy grail of animation, and I'm not sure if it's even possible with just a mouse as an input device, but I'm really thinking hard about how to make creating motion over time as easy as sketching in a 2D environment. We'll see what happens.

I'd also like to push even harder on the rig, to make it more intelligent. Poses are a good start, but I really want a character that responds to simple input as though it were alive. We're hopefully going to do some experiments with making secondary offset motion an automated process.

[Brian]   I've been kicking around the idea of expanding NG Commands so that animation can be created via macro.  Tired of making your character take a step forward?  Write a little macro and have it do the repetitive work for you.

Where can we find out more information about Maestro?

[Eric] If you go to www.stillwaterpictures.com/maestro, that's the homepage for Maestro. I'd like to create more tutorial videos and the like, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I do have a movie to make. We will do our best to get more stuff like that put up as time goes by, though.

A lot of good stuff can be found on the various forums, like NewTek's forum, Catwalk, and Spinquad. It's cool, because you can do a search for "Maestro" on any of these forums and get a lot of good feedback from actual users.

What's been the biggest challenge with bringing Maestro into the LightWave community?

[Eric] There's a certain unpredictability that comes when you try and make a tool work for anyone's workflow. When we decided to go public, we had to really start thinking about all the possible ways that other users might want to accomplish their own goals, and it made us really have to think hard about creating an interface that would be easy to understand, but that would also be fast and efficient to use. The fact is, most people (myself included) don't go out and buy some exciting new piece of software, and immediately sit down and start reading the manual. So the interface has to be really intuitive. The more features you add, especially when they are interconnected, the harder that task becomes.

When we first released Maestro 1, there were a lot of replies about issues like it not respecting whether auto key was on or not. I've never worked with auto key off, and couldn't imagine anyone else wanting to work that way either. Fortunately, we've learned a lot since then, and the version 2 release has gone really smoothly.

[Brian]  When Maestro was just an internal tool, we were willing to put up with a lot more user-unfriendliness with regards to configuring it.  Just to give you an idea, Maestro's config files were originally comma-delineated spreadsheets.  We didn't put the ability to draw and edit hotspots in until we decided to productize it. We had to make considerations like that with every aspect of Maestro. 

Any suggestions to other 3rd party developers wanting to develop a tool for LightWave?

[Brian] LScript has a lot of the right ingredients for developing and publishing a commercial tool for LightWave.  You can write the LScript, compile it once, and have it immediately run on both the Mac and the PC.  (I'm not kidding about this, we don't have a separate Mac and PC version of Maestro, they're both the exact same binary file.)  I think it's also important to mention that we're not a software company.  I'm an artist by trade, not a programmer.  I was able to pick up LScript pretty quickly and make the tools we needed.  That's a testament to how simple LScript is to learn and use.  Anybody who's thinking of writing a plug-in for LightWave really should consider starting with LScript. 

Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us, Brian and Eric!

To learn more about Maestro, please visit their official site at www.stillwaterpictures.com/maestro.