Welcome to Maya

We had our first lesson in Maya from Georg today. If I havent explained it already, Maya is proffesional 3D animating software, and is used by all the big animation companies in the industry. I is created by Autodesk, a company which has pretty much monopolised the animation industry. Georg started by talking us through everything you can see onscreen when you start Maya up.

he talked us around all of the toolbars, and showed use what most of the basic tools. We learnt some useful shortcuts which are as follows:

q - selection tool

w- move

e - rotate

r - scale

a - frames all th obects in the screen

f - frames the selected object in the screen

Holding alt allows you to adjust the camera using the mouse buttons, e.g. to dolly or track with it.

We made short bouncy ball animations without squash or stretch.This meant we learnt how to create polygons, a sphere in this case, and then learnt how to insert keyframes, and use an animation graoh to move the keyframes to correct the timeing. Here are the two bouncing ball animations I created:

They have no colour, but as my first animations in Maya, I am proud of them and hope to soon create some with stretch and squash.