Helping Two Animators Out

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BB has been asking me about Maya, hierarchy and constraints. He will soon be enrolling into Animation Mentor. BB's working with Softimage XSI over the past year and more. However, Animation Mentor requires students to work in Maya. Thus, for those who are not familiar they may require additional modules to learn the basics and be familiar with Maya.


We were talking about having a time where we can meet up so she can ask me things related to Maya.  Finally we found a day we could both be available, and it was today. I was on leave and she could meet up after her day's work. 


She came with Z and had dinner with Christina and myself at Saizeriya, City Square Mall. We had dinner and came back to my place. There I sat them down and showed them Maya basics with Maya 2012.


I demonstrated the following:

- Maya UI shortcut keys (maximising a viewport, hiding/showing the channel box panels)
- basic transformation, using transform handles
- constraining transform in one- or two-axes
- snapping to grid / vertices / edges / curves with translation
- Maya's transform and shape nodes paradigm
- hierarchy with groups/parents
- using arrow keys to navigate selection to objects in the scene / hierarchy
- constraints
- switching between world-space and local-space with marking menus
- delete history and the double-transformation phenomenon 
- freezing transformations
- setting up an extra (intermediate) controller to an already animated object
- parent constraints
- baking an animation


The whole demonstration took more than an hour. I hope they got the answers they were looking for. 


If I have time I might consider doing tutorials of these topics and uploading them.
Location: Singapore

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