HiliteKeyFrame 1.0.0 for Maya (maya plugin)

Sebastian Haas' Hilite KeyFrame plugin

What Does It Do?

Currently, in Maya, selecting an animation control in Maya shows you on which frame there are keyframes in the timeline.
In newer Mayas, it will also show you in the channel box when an attribute of a selected node is keyed on a certain frame.

All of that is nice and all, but what if you want to know when *another* control is keyed. For example if you want to start moving something just when the animation of another thing has started/finished? You'd have to jump between selecting the two controls all the time, or remember a bunch of framenumbers.

With this plugin, you can have any control you want light up if it has a key set at the current frame.

To install:

put hkf.py somewhere in your plugin path

shelf_HKF.mel has two (python) command buttons that will activate or deactivate hiliting on currently selected controls

Put the two icons into maya's icon path, or elsewhere and adjust the shelf button icons

Notes:

Even with a lot of controls set to hilite and a lot of keyframes, I haven't noticed any slowdown of maya.

The plugin uses a drawing override on the controls *shape*. On the one hand, this does not interfere with the usual practice of using the controls transform drawing override to color left/right controls different colors, etc... On the other hand, if activated, it takes precedence over the transforms override. So, without messing with most rigs control color setup, this plugin can give you valuable information (and have your rig light up like a christmas tree if you enable hiliting on all your controls :D)

It will not hilite the 'virtual' key frames from a pre/post infinity cycle animation curves (in this it behaves similar to the key frames showing up in the timeline)

Uses NodeId 0x00120740, from my officially registred node id block, please don't reuse it (you can get your own node id block from autodesk just by asking them)

To use:

Load the plugin.

Select some controls that you want keyframe hiliting to be enabled.

Click the hilite shelf button (or run the hiliting code in some other manner of your choosing)

Now, on every frame that a control has any keyframe set, it will light up in white.

If you select the control, the KeyFrameHiliteNode will appear in its inputs and you can change the color used to hilite it. Currently you have to check Display Overrides for which color is which.

To disable:

Select the controls you don't want hilite anymore.

Click the unhilite shelf button (or run the unhiliting code in some other way you like).

Or, just delete all nodes called KeyFrameHiliteNode.