Introduction to Computer Aided Modeling Instructor: Brent Rossen CGS 3220 Lecture 5 Animation Basics

Overview Changing and saving preferences Grouping and parenting objects Understanding parent inheritance Setting keyframes Using the time slider Using the graph editor Traversing a hierarchy

Preferences Since we messed with the interface a lot last lesson, let’s make sure we know how to set it back. Also, we like undo, so let’s up our undo size Hotbox Controls > Window Options > Show Main Menubar On, Show Pane Menubars On Display > UI Elements > Show UI Elements Lots o’ Undo: Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences Settings > Undo > Queue Size – 50 or infinite

Why get organized? When you hit save your preferences are saved Let’s save as… garageAnimation.mb When animating it’s important that you have the ability to get lost in the animation For that, you need everything else to be as simple as possible So, we’ll keep everything in our scene very tightly organized

Grouping and Parenting Grouping and parenting is the main way you will keep your scene organized, much of this is done through the Outliner Window > Outliner Right now, our scene is pretty disorganized First let’s make a main group of all the objects Use ctrl and shift to select all the objects we’ve made in the outliner Edit > Group or Ctrl+g Expand the group by hitting the +, then double click the name group1 and rename it garageGroup

More Grouping Select just the object named shelf and ctrl+g to group it Now it’s in a group all by its lonesome Rename the group shelvesGroup Select the rest of the shelves and MMB+drag them onto the shelvesGroup Now all of the shelves are children of the shelvesGroup MMB+drag the shelvesGroup onto the garage object, now that group is a child of the garage

Finishing our cleanup Still in the outliner, select the bulb then ctrl+click the lamp Edit > Parent or Ctrl+p Organize the boxes, wire, door, and door knob as well It’s “nice” that everything is organized, but that’s got limited usefulness, but what we’ve actually made is a very useful object hierarchy

Traversing the hierarchy When you’re lazy (which is the goal), and don’t want to open the outliner, you can still traverse the heirarchy  Up arrow – parent  Down arrow – first child  Right arrow – next child  Left arrow – previous child

Understanding inheritance Hierarchies get your scene organized, but they also play a key role in animation When you transform a parent object, all of its children and grandchildren will be effected So, before moving your objects, you’ll often want to freeze the transformations of objects to reset the attributes to their defaults while leaving the objects in place Also, be sure pivot points are set correctly before animating transformations

Freezing Transformations Let’s reset the attributes on everything! Select garageGroup Edit > Select hierarchy  Or, Shift+click the +, which expands the whole hierarchy, and shift select all the objects Modify Freeze transformations If you don’t want to freeze all attributes, make use of the options box

Child values Select the wire – the lamp and bulb should be children of the wire Let’s reposition the wire Notice the lamp and bulb’s attributes have not changed at all, but they did move This applies to rotation and scale as well But what does this have to do with animation? You’ll see in a moment.

The Timeline First thing we should do, is decide how long we want the animation to be To decide this we need to know how fast it will play By default, Maya plays animation at 24 fps, which is the standard rate used for reel film So, for one second of animation, we’ll use 24 frames In the time slider and range slider, change the Playback end to 100 If it’s not open at the bottom of your screen, Display > UI Elements > Time Slider, Range Slider

Keyframes To animate, we don’t create every single frame of animation, as you would do with traditional animation You set keyframes and Maya will interpolate between the values  if you’ve ever used flash this is called tweening or in-betweening Select the garageDoor and make sure all it’s rotation and translation values have been set to 0

Animating the garageDoor With the door still selected Animate > Set Key or ‘s’, this keys all channels on the object Move to frame 100 Change translate Y to 5, hit enter, change focus to the viewport and hit ‘s’ again Image on right is ghosted

Menu-sets If you’re using the regular interface (not the hotbox), you can switch between menu sets using the F# hotkeys, or the pull-down  F2 – Animation, F3 – Modeling, F4 – Dynamics, F5 – Rendering As usual, F1 is help – try the help search whenever something isn’t clear

Playing Animation Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences, Select Timeline or hit the animation preferences button in the lower right or the range slider  Make sure the Playback Speed is set to 24 fps, hit save Hit play, or alt+v to watch your animation Hit alt+v again to stop the animation  You can also click drag the time slider to see any point in the animation

Tweaking the animation Let’s refine our animation by having the knob rotate then making the door pivot into the garage Hold shift, and click frame one in the time slider, drag the red keyframe to frame 20  Now we can animate the knob from frames 1-20

Animate the doorKnob Select the doorKnob (warKnob) ctrl+a twice to get to the channel box Make sure you are on frame 1 RMB on the rotate z channel, or the axis that will turn the knob the appropriate direction, and Key Selected or Shift+e Go to frame 20 Rotate the knob along the z by -90, shift+e Alt+v to watch it

Rotate/Translate garageDoor Change the door so it’s in this position at frame 100 and key it

Door Animation Note how the doorknob follows the animation, even though it’s keys haven’t been changed

Graph Editor – Editing the Animation The Graph Editor allows you to see and edit the interpolation between keyframes Window > Animation Editors > Graph Editors or Alt+g Press ‘f’ or ‘a’ to frame The black dots are keyframes The line is the animation curve

Fine Tuning Try messing with the keframes by MMB+dragging the keys around Select the entire curve and press Tangents > Flat Now the animation will gradually accelerate/decelerate Test the animation Select the garageDoor and flatten its tangents too

Conclusion Save your scene! We’ve now covered the basic concepts of animation: grouping and parenting, setting keys, and inheritance of transformation and animation. We also saw the two most useful editors: the Outliner and the Graph Editor Next lesson, we’ll take a closer look at the tools Maya provides for interacting with 3d scenes