You can't fix spacing you can't see. A motion trail draws the path a control travels across a range of frames, with a dot on each frame — so you can read the arc and how evenly the frames are spread. Maya has this built in. Here's how to turn it on, and why the built-in version only gets you halfway.
Turn on Maya's editable motion trail
Select the control you want to inspect, then use the Visualize → Create Editable Motion Trail command (in the animation menu set). Maya draws the trail in the viewport: the path as a line, plus a dot per frame that you can even grab and move to re-time directly.
It's free, it's built in, and for checking whether an arc is smooth it does the job.
Where the built-in trail stops short
The trail is a single color. You can see the path, but not the speed. Tightly bunched dots mean slow, spread-out dots mean fast — so to read spacing you're squinting at how far apart the frame dots sit, section by section. On a busy trail that's slow, and easy to misjudge.
A speed-colored trail
AnimKit's motion trail colors the path by speed. Fast stretches and slow stretches are different colors, so ease-in, ease-out, and any spacing hitch jump out without counting dots. You're reading timing at a glance instead of measuring it.
To be fair: Maya's built-in trail is free and fine for confirming an arc. The speed-coloring matters when you're polishing spacing and want to see where the animation speeds up and slows down.
Try it
The motion trail is one tool inside AnimKit — a Maya animation toolkit. It's paid, and the full tool list is on the AnimKit page.
_See how the tools compare in our roundup of the best Maya animation plugins, or jump straight to the AnimKit vs animBot comparison._
