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Merci,
Mille

Interpretive Dance via the Maya Timeline

1. Turn Auto Keying on and off. Click the little key icon to the right of the timeline. Red is on, black is off.

2. Move a Key. Shift + Left Click on a key. Let go. Click and drag on the inner set of arrows to move it to its new location. When you're done, click somewhere else in the timeline to cancel out of the move/scale mode. Be careful not to click the outer set of arrows. Those will scale yer keys. That's bad (for now).

3. Copy a Key. Right Click on a key and choose Copy from the fly-out menu.

4. Paste a Key. After copying a key, right click the frame into which you'd like to paste your copied keyframe. Choose Paste > Paste from the fly-out menu. Beware not to just click paste and let go. There are two pastes you have to choose. It's Maya, remember.

5. Change Playback Range. Enter new numbers in the inner set of boxes 'neath the timeline.

6. Change overall animation length. Enter new numbers in the outer set of boxes 'neath the timeline.

Getting Set Up in Maya

Maya's got a funny way of showing that it loves you. Here are the steps you need to take to get it to behave correctly. You should only have to do this once. (Until you have to trash your pref's, then you'll be doing it again. Ah ha ha ha. Ha. ha. ugh.)

1. Set default frame rate and initial animation length. From the menu bar, choose File > New Scene > Options Box. Set to NTSC 30 fps. You'd think this would be under preferences, and it is! It just doesn't act as a default there. Good lord.

2. Create a new Scene. Hit the New button at the bottom of the Options dialogue.

3. Set playback to Real Time (30 fps). Under Maya > Preferences > Settings > Timeline > Playback. Also, go ahead and set Looping to continuous.

4. Set Default in and out tangents to Linear. This is under Maya > Preferences > Settings > Animation. Go ahead and check the Weighted Tangents box here as well. Ha ha, notice there are two categories of "Animation" in the preferences panel. Make sure you're on the right one. Brilliant.

5. Create a new project. File > Project > New.

6. Set up the new project. In the New Project dialogue that pops up do the following:
a) Enter a Name for your project.
b) Hit the "Browse" button next to location and choose a place on your account that makes sense to you. Pay attention when you are doing this; if you don't know where your project is, y'all's in trouble. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CREATE A NEW FOLDER. Maya will automatically put everything into a new folder with your project name on it.
c) Hit the Use Defaults button at the bottom of the dialogue box.
d) Hit the Accept button at the bottom of the dialogue box
e) If you want to switch between projects later, go to File > Project > Set

Final Frontier

Le 3D final critique will be Tuesday, March 17 at 6:30 p.m. in Le Lab Digital. C'est magnifique.