Autodesk Maya 2014 Essentials

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’ll 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 ...