Using Basic Animation in Maya

Video Transcript

"Hey everybody. My name's Matt and I'm speaking to you on behalf of Expert Village. As I said earlier you can also animate with Maya. You can animate pretty much anything that you can select and a lot of cases even more. Down here at the bottom is your time-line. You can click and drag your cursor through there and if you come down you can also zoom in and out on your time-line using this bar right here. And you can, over here, select how many frames are in your animation. I'm going to select 90. So there's, I have 3 seconds worth of animation. To actually animate, all you have to do is select and object you want to animate. I'll select the box with the cat on it. Make sure that this key over here is lit. That's your Auto Key Frame Toggle. Make sure that, that's red. I'm going to select my box and hit the S key on my keyboard that sets a key. Then I'm going to move to where I want my box to be. I'm going to go to 90, that's the 90th frame and I'm going to select the box and move it. That automatically sets a key frame. As I scroll you can see the box move along through space. You can also do this for rotation as well as scale. And like I said you can animate pretty much anything. I'm going to select my light there, set a key frame and rotate that around. As you can see they both animate now. Another thing you can do to get greater control over your animation is; go up to Window and Animation Editor and there is a couple of different views you can use. I'm going to select Graph Editor and you can see kind of a graph of your animation for each object. I have my spotlight selected right now and you can select the different end points and you can edit the curves by selecting a point on the curve. Make sure you use your middle mouse button and you can adjust the curves accordingly."