The easiest way to create breakdown poses in Maya.
Say you’re creating poses for your character with stepped keys, and have created key poses on frames 1 and 10. You want to make a breakdown pose on frame 7, but you want it to favor the first pose by 70%. The following comparison shows how this would be accomplished both with and without tweenMachine.
| Manual Process | tweenMachine |
| Select all controls on the character | Select all controls on the character |
| Change interpolation on all keyframes to linear | Left-click on frame 7 in the timeline |
| Left-click on frame 3 in the timeline | Adjust a slider in the tweenMachine interface to -70 |
| Middle-click on frame 7 in the timeline | |
| Set a key | |
| Change interpolation on all keyframes to stepped | |
| Total Steps: 6 | Total Steps: 3 |
If you’re not happy with the results, you’ve got a lot of steps to repeat if you’re doing it the manual way. With tweenMachine, you simply adjust the slider and see the results immediately. Better still, if you’ve created a custom set that controls the entire character, you can skip the first step and save even more time.
Will tweenMachine create perfect breakdown poses? Not likely, but it will get you closer to your goal a lot faster than other methods. You spend less time with busywork and more time making actual progress.
tweenMachine has moved!
In February 2018, development was turned over to Alex Widener, who created a GitHub repo for more appropriate hosting, revision tracking, etc. Unfortunately things didn’t progress very far past that point, and the repo was switched to archive (read-only) mode in mid-2021.
Fast forward to August of 2022, when I was approached by Wade Schneider, another animator/developer who expressed a strong interest in taking the reins. In fact, he had already forked Alex’s repo and released a version that would work with Python 3. With that, Wade is now the official (by my standards) developer of tweenMachine for Maya. You can find his repo here: