Week 8 Class Practical: Animation UI and Settings

With us moving onto part 2 of the assignment, this weeks class practical revolves around the animation suite that is bundled in with Maya. To begin, I will be getting acquainted with the Maya animation user interface. At the bottom of the screen, underneath the viewports, Maya has a time slider and playback controls. The numbers along the time slider correlate to the starting/ending time of the animation and playback.

For our assignment we will be using animation at 30fps for 30 seconds. To set this first go to "Window", then "Settings/Preferences" and finally "Preferences". Whilst in this menu, we have to change the "Time" option under the settings category to "NTSC (30fps)". To finalise these changes in I need to change the outside numbers on the time slider to 1 and 900 (30 fps x 30 seconds = 900).

To help see the frames on the time slider more clearly you can also change the height of the slider and the size of the keyframes in the slider. These settings are accessed from the same category as the previous settings but under the "Time Slider" sub-menu. Changes the settings as shown in the screenshot make the time slider and keyframes easier to see while working on an animation.

This menu also has options to change the playback of the animation to real time, so you can see an accurate representation of the animation in the viewport. You can also set the animation playback type in this settings menu, for example you can set it to loop once, continuously, or oscillate (back and forth looping).