Dollying, Tracking, and Tumbling

Dollying, tracking, and tumbling allow you to change your view of a scene, controlling how far or near its objects appear. Since you're always looking through a camera, dollying, tracking, and tumbling provide ways to move that camera around the scene. These are some of the most important tools in Maya because you need to see objects from every direction and dimension. The point of view from which you're viewing your scene becomes important to the alignment and placement of objects.

Tracking a view moves that view up, down, or sideways. You might track a view to get a look at an object that's currently out of view.

To track a view:

1.	Move the mouse over any pane.
2.	Hold down ( on a Macintosh) and use the middle mouse button to drag the scene in the desired direction (Figure 2.3). Figure 2.3. Tracking drags the scene up, down, or sideways.

Dollying a view visually enlarges or shrinks the view, bringing objects closer (zooming in) or moving them farther away (zooming out).

To dolly a view:

1.	Move the mouse over any pane.
2.	Hold down / plus the right mouse button, dragging left to shrink the view and right to enlarge the view (Figure 2.4). Figure 2.4. Dollying is used to zoom in and out of specific areas of the scene; dollying right (bottom) enlarges the view.

Tumbling a view visually rotates it around the center of interestuseful for getting the full 3D effect of the objects and scene. For example, you could tumble around an object to get a view of its front, back, and sides from any angle.

To tumble the view:

1.	Move the mouse over the Perspective view.
2.	Hold down / and use the left mouse button to drag and rotate the scene in the direction desired (Figure 2.5). Figure 2.5. This is the Maya interface with four panes visible. Tumbling (which only works in the Perspective view) rotates the view around an object or scene.

Tips

• You can also use the scroll wheel on your mouse to dolly without holding down any other mouse buttons. Scrolling up enlarges the view, scrolling down shrinks it.

• You can marquee-zoom in by pressing / and / while dragging a marquee from upper left to lower right with the left mouse button. You can zoom out by dragging lower right to upper left. The smaller the square, the larger the zoom.

• You can hold while tumbling to constrain the tumble along a specific axis.