Starting to Animate with Maya

Alright! Now that you know how to make an object, shade it and give it highlights, it’s time for some good old-fashioned animating!

Now, I would start with something simple, like just making a ball move across the screen. OKAY! So, what you do first is bring that ball that we made into the grid(open you ball project). alright, so far so good! now, It will get a little tricky at parts, but it’s going to be okay people!

So, set maya to animation(there’s a little window option in the top left that will either say “Surface, Animation, Polygons, Dynamics, and Rendering”) and after that, you need to set how many frames will be in the animation. This is at the bottom of the screen. I would keep it at its default, 24 frames.

Now, press the arrow right next to the timeframe(the thing at the bottom) that makes the time go all back to frame 1. Pick a position you want the ball to be at first with the moving tool, and then click Set Key. The Set Key tool is under the Animation window above the application. It’s right next to Assests and Geometry. If you still don’t know where it is, i’ll walk you through it personally.

The Set Key element makes the object stay where it is in that frame. After that, you can Set Key different frames as many times as you want! So, go to frame 3, move the ball to a different location, and Set Key. Do this as many times as you want until you get to frame 24. Frame 24 is the LAST frame, so this Key Set is the place where the ball will end it’s magical journey all over the screen.

Now, this is a simple animation of a ball moving, so it isn’t going to be “OHMYGOSHTHISISAMAZING!” good. It’s just something cute and fun to mess around with.

I hope you guys found this helpful, and if you have any questions, email me at balgowr1@tcnj.edu

~ by shadowdroid677 on February 22, 2013.