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WMBrown
07-05-2006, 11:54 PM
allrighty, i've already scanned and searched this forum and haven't come up with much (unless i'm missing something, which could be the case)

now, on to the meat of the question.

I am a regular MAX user and i've been given the challenge of animating a character... but it's a maya character/rig and i've only so far as opened Maya within the past day.

i'm already familiarising myself with Maya with the videos from 3D Buzz so i'm not totally without ammunition and i know enough on how to set keyframes and scrub the timeline but i was wondering...

for someone that's more familiar with MAX than Maya, are there any good sites out there that are "Must See"s? i know that the basic principles of animation are the same, but i need to know the basics of animation for this package... do the F-Curves from MAX have a Maya Equivalent? how do i set step tangents as the defailt keyframe mode (this is possible, right)? these are the types of questions that i have and i would be very grateful to anyone that's willing to offer some advise or redirects to threads either here or elsewhere (if you know of them offhand)

Thank you in advance
]-UnderTOW-[
07-06-2006, 01:17 AM
Ok, well here are just a few little things to help you with working with maya.

First of all to answer your questions, Maya's F-Curves are edited within the Graph Editor. They always have tangent handles (except when you set the type to Stepped). There are various types of tangents like linear, spline, clamped, etc which you can choose and will alter the tangent values rather than completely change the key type like max (unless it's Stepped).

To move a key or tangent handle select with LMB and move with MMB. MMB is a common tool in maya, doing various different things in different editors such as:
-Alter the selected attribute in the Channel Box (MMB drag left and right in the viewport)
-Move the currently active axis on the move, rotate and scale manipulators in the viewport.
-MMB drag the time slider will keep the scene's values at the time you move from. EG: translateX = 0 at frame 0. At frame 10 it equals 5. Say you want frame 15 to have a value of 2.5, if you MMB drag from frame 5 to frame 15 and key translateX, it will be 2.5.
-Use MMB to connect nodes in the Hypershade (like to connect a texture to the colour channel of a material).

To move, copy/paste, scale keys in the timeline, hold Shift and LMB drag to highlight. After a scale, you can snap the keys to frames in the timeline RMB menu. If you hold down Shift+S and click LMB in the viewport, it'll produce a key specific marking menu where you can delete keys, copy/paste keys, convert to breakdown keys, etc.

S keys all keyable attributes of the selected object, but there are also other handy shortcuts: Shift+W will key translate keys, Shift+E will key rotate keys and Shift+R will key scale keys.
Autokey doesn't work like Max's. It will only key attributes that already have keys. Simply key the attributes you want to be affected by autokey at the start of the timeline.
S will key ALL attributes associated with the current Character Set you have activated, but Shift+W/E/R will only key the current object.
You can only use the Trax editor (non-linear animation) with Character Sets.
WMBrown
07-06-2006, 02:14 AM
Awesome! thank you! i'm copy/pasting this into a file here for easy reference.
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