Summary

With animation, you can make anything change over time. You can use dynamics (demonstrated in Chapter 15, "Particle Systems and Dynamics") or path animation to let Maya do the work, or you can manually key the primary settings and let Maya fill in the in-between frames. There are many other advanced ways to create animation with Maya, and this chapter has served primarily as an introduction to the methods of creating, evaluating, and editing your animation in Maya. In this chapter, the following concepts were summarized:

• Setting up a scene for animation You used the Preferences dialog box to set up your scene for animation.

• Keys and animation Understanding how keys are set is the first step to animating your scene.

• Editing keys and animation curves Sometimes, settings keys doesn't give you enough control over the animation. Modifying the animation curves, tangents, and keys gives you more fine-tuned control.

• Playblasting for a quick preview It would be a real pain if you spent hours setting up a scene for animation and then spent another day rendering only to find that you don't like the way the animation plays back. However, the Playblast helps you avoid that problem.

• Modifying your lobby scene By persevering through the previous chapters, you now have a scene that's render-worthy. Your lobby is gradually becoming more finished, and by the end of this book, you'll have a nice animation to show off.