Mastering Autodesk Maya 2016: Autodesk Official Press

Chapter 6 Animation Techniques

As you learned in Chapter 1, “Working in Autodesk Maya,” objects in an Autodesk^® Maya^® scene have both a transform node and a shape node. The transform node contains data related to where the object is in a scene, its orientation, and its scale. The shape node contains data about the form of the object. If you want to animate an object moving around in a scene, usually you’ll keyframe the translation, rotation, and scale of the transform node. If you want to animate the shape of an object, such as the facial expressions of a character, you can use a deformer, which is a type of animation control applied to the shape node of an object. Deformers are extremely versatile, and they can be used for both modeling ...