Chapter 2

Creating Your First Animation

Autodesk® Maya® software can be used for many steps in a production, but one of the most fun—both to play around with and show to friends and family—is animation. So you’re going to start out by creating a simple animation. The clip you’re going to produce is one of the first exercises any animator completes: the bouncing ball.

• Using good scene-file management
• Creating and animating a bouncing ball
• Refining movement in the Graph Editor
• Using animation principles to improve your work
• Creating a playblast of your animation

Using Good Scene-File Management

Before you start, you need to set up your Maya scene so all of your assets are organized and easy to find. This will be very important as you work on more complex projects, so it’s a good habit to get into right from the start.

Maya provides a way to easily keep all the files for a project organized. It’s called the project directory. Every time you start a new scene, you should set up a new project directory, by following these steps:

1. Choose File ⇒ New Scene. 2. Choose File ⇒ Project Window. The Project window opens, as shown in Figure 2-1. 3. Click the New button next to the Current Project field and give your project a unique name, such as Project1 or BouncingBall, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-1: Project window

Figure 2-2: Project name

4. Confirm that your project is being saved to the maya/projects directory by checking the Location field, shown in Figure 2-3. Maya creates subdirectories within your main directory to hold various scene elements. These are listed under Primary Project Locations and Secondary Project Locations, as shown in Figure 2-4. 5. Click the Accept button to close the Project window.

Figure 2-3: Checking project location

Figure 2-4: Project subdirectories

6. Finally, make sure your scene has 24 active frames by checking the Time Slider, as shown in Figure 2-5. If you don’t have 24 frames, adjust the length of the Range Slider or type 24 into the End Time window.

Figure 2-5: Setting the scene to 24 frames

Creating and Animating a Bouncing Ball

Before you start animating, you’re going to change your view and turn on an option that will let you see exactly the space you’re working in. Then you’ll create your ball and set the keys that will get it bouncing.

Selecting a View and Turning On the Resolution Gate

In order to make it easier to animate your ball, you’re going to work in the Front view and turn on an option that shows just how much of that window would show up if you were to create a final render of your animation.

1. Place your cursor in the view window and tap the spacebar to access the four-view layout. 2. Place your cursor in the Front view and tap the spacebar to make the Front view active in the single-view layout. 3. In the menu at the top of the view window, choose View ⇒ Camera Settings ⇒ Resolution Gate, as shown in Figure 2-6. A rectangle appears in the Front view. Anything within the rectangle will show up in a final render. Anything in the gray area outside the rectangle will not show up. 4. Using the Pan keyboard/mouse combination (Option/Alt + MMB), move the thick, black line to the bottom of the screen. Your view should look something like Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-6: Camera Settings menu

Figure 2-7: View setup

Creating a Ball

You’ll use a polygon sphere for your bouncing ball. They’re easy to work with and look pretty good. Follow these steps to create the ball:

1. Choose Create ⇒ Polygon Primitives and click Interactive Creation to uncheck it, as shown in Figure 2-8. 2. Choose Create ⇒ Polygon Primitives ⇒ Sphere ⇒ Option Box and click. Figure 2-9 shows the selection.

Figure 2-8: Turn off Interactive Creation

3. In the Polygon Sphere Options window, shown in Figure 2-10, set the radius to 2.5.

Figure 2-9: Create Polygon Primitives Sphere menu

Figure 2-10: Polygon Sphere Options window

4. Click the Create button. 5. Press 5 on your numeric keypad or keyboard to shade the sphere. Figure 2-11 shows the shaded sphere.

Figure 2-11: Your ball, shaded

6. Save your scene, either by choosing File ⇒ Save Scene or by pressing Command/Ctrl + S.

You have your ball; now it’s time to bounce it.

Setting Movement Keyframes

In order to animate in Maya, we set keyframes for various attributes on specific frames. That lets the software know that on a particular frame, we want a particular attribute to have a particular value. Then Maya interpolates between the keyframes to create the motion we’re after. Let’s set some movement keyframes, or keys:

1. Click the Move tool in the Toolbox (shown in Figure 2-12), or press W. 2. Click the sphere, if it’s not already selected. 3. Make sure the playback head in the Time Slider is on frame 1, as shown in Figure 2-13.

Figure 2-12: Move tool

Figure 2-13: Playback head

4. Click and hold the green arrowhead on the move tool and drag the sphere up to the top of the screen. Release the mouse button. The ball should be positioned similarly to the one in Figure 2-14.

Figure 2-14: Initial ball position

5. Press S. This sets a key for the ball’s position, rotation, and scale on frame 1. We don’t care about rotation or scale right now, just position. 6. Move the playback head to frame 24 by clicking the playback head and dragging, and then press S again. You’re creating a cycle, and because the ball is already where you want it to end up, you’ll just set another key while it’s there. Figure 2-15 shows the playback head at frame 24. 7. Move the playback head to frame 13. 8. Click the green arrowhead (it will be yellow if still selected) on the move tool and drag the sphere down so that the bottom just touches the black line. Figure 2-16 shows the ball in its down position.

Figure 2-15: Setting the final key at frame 24

9. Press S to set a key. 10. Save your scene. 11. Click the Play Forwards button, shown in Figure 2-17, on the bottom-right side of the screen to see your ball move.

Figure 2-16: Moving the ball down

Figure 2-17: Play Forwards button

Note: If your ball is bouncing very fast, open the Preferences window, select Settings Time Slider, and under Playback set Playback Speed to Real-time [24 fps].

Refining Movement in the Graph Editor

Your ball is moving—pretty cool! But right now it’s not really bouncing. There are a couple of problems with the way it’s moving. Part of the task of an animator is to make things move the way we know they should. In this section, you’ll adjust some things to get your ball bouncing like a real ball would.

What’s Wrong with the Way My Ball Is Bouncing?

The reason the ball is moving the way it is has to do with how Maya tries to interpolate between keys. Maya uses tangents to interpolate between the keys we set, and sometimes the tangents don’t work as we need them to. You’ll adjust the tangents so the ball moves the way you want:

1. Press Esc to stop playback. 2. With the ball still selected, choose Window ⇒ Animation Editors ⇒ Graph Editor, as shown in Figure 2-18. 3. With pSphere1 selected, press A on your keyboard. Several lines appear in the Graph Editor window. These are the tangents for the attributes you set by pressing S. You really need only one of these, so you’ll select just that one. 4. Click Translate Y in the left column of the Graph Editor. 5. Press A on your keyboard to zoom in on the tangent. Your window should look like Figure 2-19.

Figure 2-18: Graph Editor menu selection

Figure 2-19: Translate Y in the Graph Editor

Adjusting Spline Tangents

The tangent tells us a lot about how something’s moving. The greater the change in the tangent as it moves from left to right, the faster the change in that attribute onscreen. The smaller the change in the tangent, the slower the change in that attribute. Looking at the tangent for Translate Y, we can see that the ball starts out slowly (as shown by the flat tangent lines), picks up speed (represented by the steep tangent lines), and slows down...