Help Wanted: Custom Key Tick Color Script needed

[keith-sizemore]

Hey there guys, I'm an animator who is looking for someone to script something for me for free...

The idea is, I would like to be able to change the color of my individual key ticks on the time slider.  

I found a way to do it through settings/preferences-> Color settings -> Animation ->adjust Time Slider tick Special color.  Select the tangents in the graph editor for the specific keys.  Then go into the command line and execute "keyframe -tds on".  However I'm only allowed to change the keys to just one color ie.Tick Special color.  

I would like to have the ability to color code my different keys for keyframes, breakdowns, inbetweens, etc. etc.  In maya there is an option for converting a key to a breakdown, but there's a scaling factor in the keys if any keyframes are adjusted, which I don't want.

So, all I'm asking is for a color swatch of say 8 colors that just by shift selecting the key in the timeslider and then selecting a swatch from the "colorKey" window, will change the key's color.  Presto! a clean animation production!

If anyone could write this out it would be greatly appreciated, but not only by me, but all of the other animators out there who sometimes no matter how good they are get lost in the polishing stages...

Thank you for your time, Keith Sizemore 

[joojaa]

It is highly likely that this script can not be done*. See scripters can not in general change mayas behavior, just build on existing behavior they have exactly the same limitations as you do (that is they just do the same thing just lots of it). And in this case if Autodesk is not providing a mechanism for:

1) storing the color attribute per key (does not seem to be there, but the api MIGHT do this. Even so painful)
2) telling the QUI item to custom draw (no does not seem to be there, QT might be able)

then theres only a VERY slim chance that somebody would be able to do things outside of this scope. In which case it would be a hack, involve a lot of work, that's error prone and might not be able to work in newer mayas, and include QT (which means very hard to distribute)

Doing a very brief preliminary study seems to confirm this is the case. OTOH i dont have maya 2012 to have a look see if they have done this but i doubt it. Contact Autodesk you are a paying customer you have the right, and for them this is just a slightly painful exercise (there is a bit of a CS problem here as it would increase mayas memory usage, i suspect this feature is there because they were left over with one bit of info somewhere). Its not that I don't see your idea as valid, I do, but rather unimplementable like the idea of making anti-gravity.

However: It might be possible to cobble up a script that may enable you to make groups of ticks that you can retrieve for later viewing one group at a time. Tough even that seems to be a bit of a mess to implement as you'd need to monitor all key frame changes.

• anybody that can prove me wrong, would be highly appreciated.

[pilou--2]

I Looked at it a bit and it seems that you can't manually have different key colors at the same time. I don't know Api languages but i definitly went to the same conclusion as Joojaa that it can't be done, in Mel anyway.