Beginners Guide Maya

Beginners Guide Maya

 

Introduction
In this beginners guide we discuss how to build a simple humanoid character and how
to animate it.
It was not our intention to give a step-by-step guide on how to build a character and
how to animate it, because there is extensive amount of literature available on this.
This guide can be used next to the “Learning Maya 5 Foundation” book as a source
for more information and explanation. We found that although the book is very clear
on what actions to do and what the actions will result in, it lacked somewhat in
explaining the meaning of concepts and the reasons for performing actions.
In this guide, we first give an explanation of the Maya interface and the main interface
elements that are important for character building and animation.
We then follow the “Learning Maya 5 Foundation” subjects on building and
animating a humanoid character. First building the basic character by creating a
skeleton, adding geometries, flexors and selection handles. Then preparing the
character for animation, by adding controls for movements with expressions, rotate
planes and vector constraints. Then animating the character by creating character
nodes, keyframes, linear animation, non-linear animation and non-destructive keys
(secondary animation) and the Maya Embedded Language (MEL). In the last part we
discuss shortly the use of cameras, lighting, texturizing, rendering.