Dollying, Tracking, and Tumbling

Dollying, tracking, and tumbling are movie industry terms for the camera movements that let you change your view of a scene. In Maya, virtual cameras provide you with different views of your 3D scene. Because you're always looking through a camera, dollying, tracking, and tumbling provide ways to move that camera around the scene. This movement changes the distance and angle at which you see the objects in a scene, which is very important when working in Maya. Whether you're modeling or animating, you need to be able to see objects from many different perspectives.

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.

Dollying a view moves its camera "in" or "out," bringing objects closer (zooming in) to make them appear larger, or moving them farther away (zooming out) to make them appear smaller.

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

To track a view:

1.	Move the mouse over any panel.
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 moves a view up, down, or sideways. Here we track right in a scene of a fruit bowl.

To dolly a view:

1.	Move the mouse over any panel.
2.	Hold down / plus the right mouse button, and drag left to shrink the view or right to enlarge the view (Figure 2.4). Figure 2.4. Dollying is used to zoom in and out of the scene; moving the mouse right while dollying enlarges the view.

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. Tumbling rotates a view around its center point. Here we tumble 180 degrees around the fruit bowl.

Tips

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

• You can find additional camera movement tools in the View > Camera Tools menu in any view panel. This menu also includes options for dolly, track, and tumble, accessible by clicking the box to the right of the corresponding menu item.