EOV Curve Painter v1.0.0

EOV Curve Painter is a free tool for Maya that lets you draw animation curves with the mouse, right on top of the Graph Editor. Drag along a curve and the section under the stroke becomes keys - freehand, as a polyline or as bezier arcs. The eraser takes a piece down to zero or onto a line. Every stroke is an ordinary Maya key edit: Ctrl+Z undoes all of it in one step.

Moving keys one at a time is great for the final polish and poor for shape. Lifting a sagging hop, smoothing out a bump, thinning out a baked mocap curve - that is one movement of the hand, not twenty drags and a round of tangent tweaking. The tool takes over exactly that part.

Freehand

Hold the left button, drag, release - the section under the stroke is replaced with keys. Hand jitter is smoothed out (Smooth), and you get as many keys as the shape needs: the tool checks the curve Maya builds against your stroke and adds a key wherever it strays past the tolerance (Simplify). A sharp turn gets more keys, a straight stretch fewer.

Zigzag and bezier

Zigzag - click points, straight lines run between them. Bezier - points with handles, as in a vector editor: click for a point, click-and-drag for a point with a handle, Ctrl breaks a handle. Until you press Enter everything stays editable: move points, delete them, or drop the whole thing with Esc. The outer bezier points snap onto the curve and take its slope, so the joins are smooth.

Eraser

Drag the eraser across a curve and the section over the stroke's frames is erased: it drops to zero, to the default value (one for scale, neutral on an additive layer) or onto a line drawn where the eraser went. Rounding sets how softly the curve goes down and comes back up.

Only what you draw changes

The edges of the section stay on the old curve, and nothing outside it moves. The slopes of the nearest keys beyond the edges are frozen, so the neighbours do not bend. The playback range is a border too: a stroke past the time slider is cut there. A stroke goes into the visible curve nearest to where you pressed.

Drawing on a layer

With Layer ticked you draw on the real curve, a grey ghost shows the original, and To layer moves the drawing into an override animation layer and gives you your curve back as it was. The + button with an object selected makes a layer holding a copy of its motion - as all layers together produce it - selects it, and you draw right on its curves. The base animation is left alone; mute the layer or dial its weight down.

From a blank page

Nothing selected and the Graph Editor empty? The tool creates a locator with every channel. Pick a channel in the Graph Editor list and sketch a motion from scratch. + New gives you the next locator.

The panel

A narrow panel next to the Graph Editor: modes, the mode's settings, the layer row, and Auto Frame and Normalized checkboxes that mirror the Graph Editor. While you draw, the tool turns Auto Frame off so the view does not slide away under the mouse. The drawing cursor is a white pencil, with style and size in the gear menu; the pin keeps the panel on top of all windows.

What it does not do

It does not replace hand work with keys: it is a quick first pass, and the polish is done the usual way. It does not draw on empty space in Normalized and Stacked views - there a stroke always goes into the nearest curve. It does not round frames: in Zigzag and Bezier a key may land on a fractional frame. It does not transfer into a locked layer - unlock it first.

At a glance

• Autodesk Maya 2019-2026, Windows
• free, MIT license, open source
• install: drag one file into the Maya window, once per Maya version
• 0.51 MB archive
• interface in English, manual in English and Russian
• tested with a real mouse in Maya 2019, 2022 and 2025