 Hi guys, welcome to my Maya 2016 animation tutorial for beginners. In this tutorial you'll learn the basics of animation in Maya which includes setting it up properly, using keyframe animation, keyframing attributes such as lights, adding and animating cameras and also playblasting and rendering. This tutorial follows on directly from my introduction to modelling in Maya 2016 tutorial which you can find by clicking the link on screen or in the video description. If you just want to pick up straight from animation though you can download the project file which you'll also find in the description below and follow along without having to do the modelling section. There are two versions of this tutorial, the one that you're currently in is one long video with each step back to back. If that's okay then just hang on and we'll get started in a minute but if you prefer to be in a playlist with each step its own video then click on the link on screen and you'll be taken to that playlist. If you get stuck at any stage then just drop a comment below the video and I'll reply to you as soon as I can or you can contact me through my Facebook page, you can email me, you can even get me through the Twitter. Right I think that's the introduction done, let's get cracking! Okay so before we start animating the first thing we need to do is make sure that you've got all the asset files that are required. So if you have followed through my modelling tutorial all you need to do is download the assets for an animated texture that we'll do later. So to do that if you just click on the link in the description which will be labeled nicely it will take you to this link here and it will say AnimatedControlPanel.zip and there's a folder. Click on this download icon there and download it and extract it, I'll show you where to put it in a second. Then you'll need to download the entire project file including the images for the animated texture and to do that follow the link in the description again and that will take you to this link here the room project for animation and so you'll click on this download link at the top of the page and that will download. It's about 60 megabytes in total and just put it somewhere you can find it. Once you have got it so here I've got it in my Maya projects folder it should be called room project for animation so if you have a look in there this is what it is. Now if you're one of the people that has done my modelling tutorial then what I want you to do is extract the images that I've just told you to download and put them in the source images folder and you can see there's a folder here called AnimatedControlPanel and this contains all the images we need to create an animated texture later in the tutorial. If you downloaded the whole project file then you don't need to do that because when you extract it it's already in there. Okay so once you've got all the assets you need the next step is to get into Maya and to set the project before we move on. So here's Maya I've got nothing going on at the moment so the first thing I need to do is find and set the project so that Maya knows where to look for all the assets. So if I click on file and go to set the project it'll ask me where to look so I'm going to go to desktop Maya projects and I'm going to click on room project for animation and what I like to do is double click on this and when I see all these folders listed I know I'm in the right place and I'll just click on set and that now tells Maya that when it's looking for things like textures where on your computer to look and to test if it's worked successfully if you click on file and open scene it should take you to the scenes folder of the project so that will now take you to this file which I've called room complete it might be called something different in the one you download but it also might be called room complete you'll figure it out and if you double click on that it will open the scene that we're going to be working on so there's the scene open all the textures are working and we're ready to animate the next thing we do before we move on is make sure that the animation preferences are set properly so that we can do what we want to do within Maya if you followed my Maya modeling tutorial then you'll already have unlimited undoes incremental save and auto save turned on but if you didn't do that and you've just downloaded the project and you're picking up at the animation stage then follow the link on screen and that'll show you how to turn those things on they're very important and it's worth doing as for the animation preferences they're slightly different so I'll have a look at those now to get to them we're going to click on windows settings preferences and click on preferences and this brings up this little window here I'm going to start by looking on the settings section so if I go down to here basically the only thing that we're interested in here is what frames per second we're working at now I do tend to leave it at the default film 24 frames per second but it's important to know that you can change that from this setting so if I do this drop down menu here you can see that you've got 25 frames per second which is the PAL standard NTSC is 30 frames a second which is pretty standard everywhere things like the internet or you can go higher or you can do kind of whatever you want but I'm going to set mine to film 24 frames per second because that's fine to what I need the next thing we'll look at is what the default tangents are set to in Maya so to do that we're going to go down to the next section which is animation and you can see there's a lot going on there but the bit we're interested in is what the default in and default out tangents are and you can see there are a lot of different options and you can change those to whatever your preference is which is why I'm showing you really because we're not actually going to change anything I quite like it to start on auto but you could change them to any of the others and we'll find out what all those mean a little bit later when we're looking at the graph editor section of the tutorial but for now we're just going to set those both to auto and we're happy with that once you've done all that you can just click on save and everything set up we can now move on to the next bit what the next bit is to make sure that the project itself and specifically the hierarchy for the solar system is set up ready to be animated in the way we want to animate it and the way we'll check that is by looking in the outliner to see what the hierarchy looks like so we're going to go to windows and outliner which will bring up this little bad boy wash and we're interested in this bit here of the sun because if we expand this there we go you should see that we've got a little hierarchy going on so there are um I think three planets four planets in total four planets in total um planet planet one planet two planet three and they all belong to the sun and the moon belongs to planet and ring belongs to planet two in my case so make sure that's all set up like that if it's not make sure that it is so arrange it in the way that I've got mine so that when we get to that stage everything will work properly and then we can close the outliner in the next step we'll have a little bit look at the interface and how it relates to animation and we'll start setting some keyframes and actually get things moving a little bit what we're going to do now is have a look at this area here along there which is the timeline and we need to kind of know how that works so here you can see there's got a lot of numbers down here these all relate to which frame number you currently on if I click and drag this is the playhead and it tells me exactly what frame number I'm on you can see that that frame number is reflected here so if I wanted to go to frame 10 I could tap that in there and it would take me to frame 10 um you've got this chap here he's called the slider or the range slider to give it his proper name and what that does is show what frames you should be looking at so in this case um here I can see that my scene has got 200 frames in total but I'm only viewing frames one to 120 and I can change that by clicking and dragging on one of the little squares here to make the range that I'm viewing larger or smaller or I could type in the numbers either side the other thing that we need to know is that we've got these little play buttons over here so that will play forwards that will play backwards this one here will move me to the next keyframe and we'll discuss keyframes slightly later this one moves to the previous keyframe this one here moves you just onto the next frame and this one moves you to the end or this one on the other side will move you to the beginning okay so now let's get a little bit of movement done to get across the concept of keyframes and how they work in Maya so make sure your playhead is on frame one and make sure you click on the sun make sure that that is selected so there we go I've got my sun selected and then what I want to do is make sure that all of its rotation values are set to zero so x y and z are all set to zero which they are if they're not in your project change them to make sure that they are what we'll do next is change the menu set by default your menu set will probably be on modeling what we need to do is change it to animation for what we're going to do today and you'll see that these menus across the top go away grease pencil and you'll see that these settings across the top change and most important for what we need now is this one here key so what we're going to do is with the sun selected and making sure we're on frame one we're going to go to key set to key keep an eye on what happens on screen when you do this okay did you spot what changed there were two things on my screen that changed the first is this little chappy down here you can see that there's a nice red line and that indicates that a keyframe has been set on frame one we've also got all these things here have gone red and again this indicates that a keyframe has been set on all of these and these are called channels within Maya so on all of the translate rotate scale and the visibility channels a keyframes now have been set the way that the timeline works in Maya is that if I deselect the sun you'll see that keyframe goes because what Maya does is it gives each object each asset within your scene its own timeline so in order to see the keyframes on a particular asset you need to click on that so when I click back on the sun I can see that keyframe again so if you ever think you've done lots of animation and all of a sudden all your keyframes have gone just check whether or not you've actually got the object selected because it's a mistake a lot of newbies make so keep that one in mind it might be useful it might save you like it might save your life probably not okay so the way animation works in Maya is that you need two or more keyframes to create a movement so we've got one keyframe here we're going to set another keyframe at frame 100 so to do that I'm just going to type 100 in this box here and that'll just allow me to see all the way up to frame 100 and then move my playhead onto frame 100 and what I want to do is rotate it once on the y-axis so it goes all the way around and back to the position it starts in so to do that I'll type 360 in the rotate y field you won't see anything happen because it's going back to the same position but it has worked and once that's done the next thing we need to do is set a key now we did that from the key menu last time but the keyboard shortcut for that to set a key on everything is s so we'll press s on the keyboard and you'll see that a key has been set they've all gone dark red again and there is another red tick on frame 100 so we've now got one here and one here so we can play that and see how it looks so let's hit the play button and there it goes now at this stage you're probably going to notice a few things the first thing you should notice that it's playing really really quickly so we've done 100 frames and I'm operating at 24 frames per second so that should be taken about four seconds to go around it's going much quicker than that and that's because of the playback speed which will fix in a second the other thing you should notice is that the animation starts off slowly and ends slowly and that's a deal with the tangents and we'll have a look at that in a moment too and the third thing you should notice is that the animation appears to be looping and that's because the play head is going around the same 100 frames over and over so it's not actually looping but it's playing the same part of the animation over and over so let's press stop I'm just going to go back to frame one and what we're going to fix now is this playback speed issue because we don't need that so the reason that's happening is because Maya is just trying to play every frame as quickly as it can so if you've got a really good pc then it's just going to kind of be showing up and say look how quick I can play things and no one likes to show off so let's let's cut you down to size make sure everything's playing properly so to get to the animation settings you can get to it from the windows settings preferences preferences but we're not going to do it that way we're going to get it from down here which is this little red guy who's running away from a gear obviously so give that a click and this will open up the time slider preferences and you can see that the playback speed is play every frame that is very useful if you're doing things like dynamic simulations but for just kind of straight animation it's not that useful and what we really need to change though is this max playback speed which at the moment is set to free which is kind of us saying place fast as you can but to change that we're going to click on this and set it to real time which will be 24 frames per second you can see there are a couple of other options you can do it at half speed or twice speed both of those I'm sure they are useful they're not useful to us so we'll have real time 24 frames per second and then if we click on save and press play now things are moving at a more believable pace this is how it should be and this is the kind of speed that we're working with okay what we're going to do now is delete that animation off of the sun because as I'm sure you've noticed it's wrong because all the planets wouldn't rotate in a solar system in a perfect line that's nuts so let's sort that right out and so to do that make sure you're on frame one the reason you need to be on frame one is because when we remove the animation all the objects will stay where they are so if we were on frame 40 and we remove the animation the planets are just going to stay there they're not going to go back to the start position so let's make sure we do it properly so we're on frame one and then making sure you've got the sun selected and you can see your keyframes to get rid of the animation we're going to click on edit and then we're going to go down to delete by type and the way to get rid of animation is to click on channels and you'll see all that animation is gone woman press play nothing happens the next thing we'll do is a little bit more setting up of the scene to get the planets to orbit around the sun a little bit easier than they currently would so to do that we're going to click on the first planet which is this one here and if i just put the rotate tool on you can see that it wants to rotate on its its own axis like that which is not really useful because we need it to rotate around the sun so to do that we're going to use a little cheat and the way we're going to do that is to press in fact let's get it from the proper menu i won't use the keyboard shortcut yet we'll go to edit and group and as soon as i did that you should notice that the pivot moved from the center of the planet to the center of the sun and you see now that when i rotate it wants to go around the the sun which is very useful there it goes and the reason for that is that when you've got something parented and then you group it the new group takes the center its pivot position from the parent which is very very useful for what we want to do so what we need to do now is repeat that for the rest of the planet so click on that one i'm going to hit ctrl and g which is the keyboard shortcut that one there ctrl and g and the final one ctrl and g so now they all have a pivot at the sun which is spot on to double check that it's working and to make sure that you you understand which bits you need to select we're just going to click on windows and outliner here it is again and let's just expand oh it's a bit big we're going to expand the sun group and you can see now it's a little bit different because we've got these four groups and each group has got one of the planets in it and you need to understand how that works if i click on this planet here you can see i've got the planet selected in the outliner and the pivot is back on the planet but what i actually wanted to select was the group click on group two which the planet belongs to the pivot is now in the sun and it will rotate around the sun so that's the way to do that the little kind of cheat way so that you don't have to keep selecting new groups from the outliner is to select on a planet and then if you press the up key on your keyboard that jumps up one level in your hierarchy and it will then select the group for you so let's keep that in mind when we get on to animating those i'll just close the outliner quickly okay so what we'll do now is get some animation done on this first planet so i'm going to select it and then as i said previously i'm going to press up on my keyboard and that's going to take me to group one and i can now animate with the pivot that is set to the sun which is exactly what i want and what i'm going to do is make sure that i'm on frame one and i'm going to set a key just on the rotate y attribute now i could if i pressed s that would key everything but unless you really need to key all of your channels it's not a good idea to just press s it's actually better to just key only the challenge you're going to be using and because these are just going to rotate on one axis that's the only axis that i want to set any keyframes for so make sure i'm on frame one i'm going to right click rotate y and you can see this menu pops up and the option i want is key selected and you can see that's gone red now it still shows me a keyframe down here but only rotate y has got a key set on it and that's a much cleaner way to work than just setting keyframes on everything if you don't need to the next thing we'll do is move the playhead to frame 20 and then we're going to up the value of rotate y and i'm going to type in 50 you see that's now rotated part way around and then i'm going to right click on rotate y and i'm going to do key selected again and if i just scrub between those two frames you can see that the animation in there but it stops after that doesn't go any further which is exactly what i want to see at this stage so now i'll repeat that for the next planet so let's go back to frame one and i'm going to click on my next planet out press up on my keyboard to get to the group i'm going to key selected on rotate y to get the first keyframe of my motion set up straight onto frame 20 and this time instead of rotating by 50 units i think i'm going to go by something less because i'm not like an astrophysicist or anything but i believe that the further away the planets are from the sun the slower they go around it i could be wrong and i'm willing to be proven wrong uh i'm not really i would actually rather people just told me i was right um but let's basically the point i'm trying to make is i'm using a smaller number so uh i did 50 last time let's go 41 spot on and then right click and key selected okay so there we go so that one's going around but not quite as quick what i'm going to do now is i'm going to leave you to do the other two planets so select a planet go to the group set a key on frame one move to frame 20 change the rotate y value key that make sure it gets smaller as you get further out and then i'll meet you at the next stage to look at how we get those planets to keep going around the sun at the rate that we've set up in this step we'll take a look at how we go about getting the planets to keep rotating around the sun at the constant rate that we've set up before we do that though let's make sure that your project looks like mine does so if i just start to frame one and scrub through slowly you can see that all the planets kind of set off and they move around for the first 20 frames uh and they're they're all getting like as they get further out from the sun they're slightly slower so all four are moving if that's the case we now need to move on to the graph editor so what i'm going to do is click on the first planet and i want to work on the group there set up so i'm going to press up again to make sure the group is selected and now i'm going to go to windows animation editors i'm going to use this little chapter here which is the graph editor now the graph editor is amazing this is the reason that your pro 3d animators love mire and it's because the graph editor is so powerful at tweaking animations and really helping them to look natural so the first thing we'll do once we've opened the graph editor i like to have mine on full screen although if you've got a second monitor that's even better to put it over there with my mouse pointer in here i'm going to press a and that'll just frame up the curve this one here and you can see this this represents our movement so you can see it it sets off at frame zero and it's moving 50 units and you see there's a life of 50 and it's taking 20 frames to do so so all that movement is visible in the graph editor so the first thing we need to do is change the tangents and the tangents are what happens at the key frames you can see at the moment that they're curving off and they're actually slowing down that's what this represents the speed here it's speeding up and here it's slowing down and because we know that we want this on a constant loop we need that speed to be constant and the way that we're going to do that is i'm just going to select the entire curve like that and i'm going to click on tangents and i'm going to change this tangent from auto which is what it currently is at and we're going to go to spline and that puts it in a nice straight line and that means that the speed is going to be constant it's going to set off an end exactly the same speed which is beautiful the next thing we're going to do though is we need this motion to go on beyond frame 20 and what we're doing here is kind of automating that so we've done the first 20 frames worth of animation we've done a bit of the work but to get that going kind of forever which is what we're going to do we we just click a couple of things which is much easier than having to set key frames at like frame 13 000 so to do that make sure that your curve is still selected and we're going to go to curves and then post infinity and we're going to choose linear and what linear means is if your line's going in a straight line if your curve's in a straight line keep following that line beyond the last key frame so i'll click on that and you won't yet be able to see what that does but i'm just going to move the the graph around a bit and the way that you do that is kind of like you do in the main viewport so if I hold the alt key and the middle mouse button i can just tumble around like that if i use the alt key and the right mouse button i can zoom out as well like that so i'm just going to zoom out a little bit and move over here and to show you what's happening beyond frame 20 now that i've set that post infinity i just go to view and put a tick in the box with your infinity you can see that that line keeps going so now if i press play on here you'll see that these three aren't doing anything but this one now keeps going if you're wondering why it stops it's because it reaches frame 100 here and can't go any further but if i was to set this to let's say 500 it would just go around and round until it ran out of frames which would happen at frame 500 okay so now what you need to do is repeat that process for the other three planets and then we'll move on to the next step right so now we're going to move on to animating the big planet outside of the room but we're going to use a couple of attributes to do that to get it so that it actually rotates on its own axis like the earth actually does but again before we do that let's just make sure that everything's working as it should so if i click play i've now got all four of my planets going around and because they're moving at different speeds the longer this animation plays for the more random it'll start to look they'll stop lining up and it'll just look more natural more organic um lovely right let's move on to the big planet this little chappy out here so the first thing we're going to do is exactly the same as we did for the previous planets is we're going to go to frame one we're going to keyframe rotate y so keys like that move to frame 20 i'm just going to type it in that box and then i'm going to rotate y very very slightly because i want this to be a really subtle effect so i'm just going to move that by two units and then i will key that and you'll see that if i scrub between that it moves ever so slightly so it's going to give a really um subtle effect which is nice okay so we need to then go into the graph editor so i've just minimized mine down there i'm going to press a to frame up the curve and it looks as you would expect so let's select it and then we're going to change the tangent to spline get it in a nice straight line i'm going to change the post infinity to linear and that will keep going forever so now let's have a little look at this if i press play hello i'm playing it backwards let's try again if i press play beyond frame 20 that will just rotate nice and slowly and it'll look quite cool which is what we want but there is one more thing that we need to do to it to make it look more like our earth so what i'm going to do is rotate it slightly on the x axis which is the the red one on your rotate tool and i'm going to go by about minus 15 degrees i think on x like that now i don't need to set any keys for that because i don't want it to move on the x axis i just want it to sit there and this is a good example of why i didn't set a keyframe on any of the other channels because if i had this little change here now would have been impossible because i would have had to set keys to keep it at 15 rather than just being able to change it so we should now see that if i play it that's rotating on its own axis which is beautiful in the next step we'll start looking at how you add cameras and then how you animate them to get some really nice movement in your scene right then let's have a look at adding a new camera to our scene so the way that you do that let's just go back over here is we are going to go to create and then from that menu we're going to choose cameras and there is a camera so we'll click on that and you won't see anything because it's created at the origin and we already have stuff in the way don't worry if you just hit the w key to turn your move tool on and then move it up that'll move the camera out and you'll be able to see what we're dealing with so that is what a camera looks like in Maya not very useful to us yet because we can't see what it sees and obviously that's one of the most important parts of working with a camera so let's set that up so that we can see through it so if you tap your spacebar like i just did there that will bring up your foreview and these are your orthographic views what we're going to do is sacrifice one of these so that we can animate with it i think the one that i want to sacrifice i want to keep my top one because it's quite good for positioning the camera i think i'm going to sacrifice this front one here so in order to change this view to what this camera can see you click on panels perspective because it's a perspective camera and then you choose the camera that you want to see through and there it is now what that's done is made me realize that i haven't renamed this camera so i'll do that now while i've got it selected there's camera one so if i click on that i'm just going to call it shot cam like so and there you can see that's reflected down here in the shot cam view what i'm also going to do is just press six so that i can see the textures and now when i move that camera around what it sees will be reflected in the view in the bottom left which is very very useful so what we'll do now is start to animate this camera so the first thing we'll do is set the start position of the camera so again all movement is made of two or more keyframes so we need to get the start position which will be keyframe one so let's make sure that you play headers at frame one and then we're going to move the camera so in my case i actually want it to start in this back corner here and then move along the back wall so that it's looking out of the window and able to see what's in the room so i'm just going to use my top view for this and that appears to be the back corner and then i'm just going to rotate this around so that it's looking out of the front window kind of like that there so that's for me quite a nice starting position what i'll do then is set a key on that now this time because i think i'm going to rotate the camera as well i'm going to press s to set the keys so i'll press s making sure i'm on frame one and that's position one set what i'm then going to do is move to frame 200 because i think 200 frames is a nice length of time for this movement to take place and then i'm going to move the camera over to the other corner and rotate it around slightly just so that it can see out the window still so it'll almost keep this projector in view for more of the shot and when i'm happy with the position i'll press s again and that's it that's all there is to it you've created your first camera movement in Maya all that's left to do is to preview that so i'm going to show you it not working first so that you'll know what to do if it happens to you so if you've been working in this view or the top view so i'll do this view for instance and i play this camera movement you'll see here the camera's moving that nothing is happening here so that might fool you into thinking that you've not animated something properly but that's not the case the reason is that you should be able to see a light gray square around this view and that's telling you that that's the active view so what you need to do is just make this view active so i'm going to do that by middle mouse clicking in there you see the little gray box goes around it and now my camera shot is reflected it looks beautiful so let's just do that one more time it's so cinematic you could of course make it full screen by tapping spacebar with your mouse in there oh that is like cinematic genius okay so that's that step done we've created a very simple camera movement what we'll do in the next step is create a play blast to preview that in a video format in this step we're going to create a play blast before we do that we're going to make sure that the viewport is set up to make the play blast not look rubbish and to do the right number of frames so i'm just going to put my mouse in here tap spacebar to make the shot cam full screen now when we do a play blast it's going to play blast whatever frames are within the time slider and i've currently got it set from 1 to 500 but my animation is only 200 frames long so i'd get 300 frames of naut which is of no use to me so i'm going to change this number here to 200 bosh and now it will only render those 200 frames the next job is to make sure that it doesn't look daft so you can see all these lines here have previewy sort of stuff they're not really part of the animation they're just showing us where lights are and we can turn that preview off to do that we're just going to click on show from the panel menu and you can see all the different things that you can turn on and off and i just want to turn off lights and that doesn't stop your lights from shining it just stops those little lines that represent your lights from being seen in the viewport the other thing i'm going to do is make sure that i've pressed seven so that use all lights is turned on and that just makes everything look a lot nicer so this now is ready for me to create a play blast with now we can go into the play blast options and get that set up so if we go to play back the thing at the top is play blast and we'll go to the options box to get that set up here's the options box so the time range is set to time slider which is what we want because that's going to do frame one to two hundred you could set that manually the format i like to stick to a video format because the point of this is that it's just a quick preview to see how your animation looks you could do it to an image sequence but that would be nuts don't do that so i'm going to leave it at avi and the encoding i like to have on the i y u v codec for no other reason than it works for me if that doesn't work on your machine try one of the others eventually you'll get one that works but for me on this machine i y u v is working well set the quality to whatever you want i find 70 is absolutely fine i'm going to leave that alone and the display size is coming from the render settings and that's quite important as well because you want the window that you render to reflect the size that you're going to render out at later so i'll leave that as it is scale i think by default when you do a play blast for the first time the scale is set to 0.5 which can leave it at but i've been using this previously and i've up to my scale to one which is full size basically it's the full size of the frame and if you want a quicker play blast then you can turn that down to 0.5 and that'll still be absolutely fine the last thing that you really want to decide is whether or not you want to save the play blast i went to an event a few years ago and one of the animators that worked on portal 2 was there and the way that she showed us her process was through the play blasts that she created of Wheatley and so the fact that she had kept those figures meant that they were really useful in the future so you can save them and they could well be useful if you do need to show the process that you've gone through today i just want a quick preview of what's going on so i won't save it but the tick box is there if you want it once you've got everything set up you're happy with it click on play blast and you'll see what it does now is it plays through your scene one frame at a time it may go faster or slower than actual real time but when it's done it will play it back to you in a video format it should by default open whatever your default media player is so let's see what that's set to on my laptop i don't know it'll be a surprise here we go windows media player why not and you can see now it's playing it in windows media player i've got a nice preview of what my animation should be it actually shouldn't be as jerky as it's being i think the reason for that is because i'm recording at the same time it usually plays back very smoothly it should for you as well that's kind of the point of the play blast okay so that's play blasting low quality preview of animation to make sure that your motion looks as expected what we'll do next well i make the intensity of one of the lights changing to make the scene look a little bit more interesting so before we do that we're just going to move out of the shotgun view so that we don't accidentally change anything and because we can still see the lights in the main perspective view and i'm going to select the spotlight that lives in the projector if you're struggling to select it for any reason if you hit four you should be able to see it a little bit easier and then you can just click on it right so once you've got that selected we need to go to frame one and we need to find the intensity of the light to get to that we're going to move from the channel box and we're going to go to the attribute editor and this lists all the attributes for the lights and we're going to go to the tab that is spotlight shape one or whatever it's called for you and you can see i've got my color and everything and there is the intensity and this is the thing that we're going to keyframe changing over time so the first thing i'll do is make sure i'm on frame one now if i just pressed s to set this intensity it wouldn't work because when you press s it's setting keys on position size and rotation to set keys on attributes you need to right click on them so on intensity on the actual word itself i'm going to click with my right mouse button and hold and i'm going to set a key and there you go that goes red and there's my little red tick telling me that it's worked i'll then move to frame 15 i'll set the intensity to 1.5 so just make it a bit brighter and then i will key that as well and that once we render it later will just be a really subtle change of the light going up and then what we'll do in a minute is we'll use the graph editor to bring it back down and loop that going up and down over time so to get the intensity of the light moving up and down constantly we need the graph editor of course so let's get that open here's the spotlight now by default if you open your graph editor and press a it might not show you the curve and that's because it's on an attribute so you can see i've got my spotlight selected so if i just expand that i can see there that the intensity is in the graph editor but it's not yet selected to show me anything so i'll click on that and then when i go in here and press a it will frame up that curve for me and this is the intensity going up so let's select that now this time i don't want to change the tendons because i quite like that it's easing in and easing out so i'll leave that alone what i want to change is the post infinity so let's click on curves post infinity now this time i want it to go back down and then back up and back down and the right post infinity for that is oscillate so the way i remember that is like a pendulum in a clock oscillates back and forth and that's what i want this to do i want it to go back and forth between one and one point five so i'll give that a click if i just zoom out you can see that that's giving me exactly the effect i want up and down forever and that'll give a really nice look to the light in the projector in the next step things are going to get a little bit more interesting what we're going to do next is make the texture on the monitor animator so it looks like there's something moving on the screen so in this step what we'll do is make the monitor look like it's actually showing information that's like a computer screen on a loop so the first thing i'm actually going to do is select my projector and i'm just going to rotate it around so that the monitor is being hit by light because where i've got my light positioned on this side there's no light hitting it so if i put all this work into animating the texture and it wasn't lit i wouldn't be able to see anything how stupid would that be very is the answer so i've rotated it around so that it can now be seen the next thing we need to do is animate this texture and to do that we're going to modify the texture that we set previously so we're going to open the hypershade i'm going to get there the shortcut from here there it is i'm just going to press six in there so i can still see my my texture make sure i know it's working and then i'll clear my work area and i'm looking for the monitor and material so i'm going to click on that and i can see there that the color is linked to a file node so i'll click on there to take me back through to the file node and previously it was set to control panel diffuse i now want to change that to use the image sequence that you should have downloaded at the beginning of this tutorial if you didn't go back and do that otherwise none of this will work you won't have the right files so i'm going to click on the folder icon i'm going to go into this folder here animator control panel and you can see that this is what's called an image sequence so they start at zero zero and go up to 57 and what i'm going to do is just click on double zero and one thing you'll notice is that they're named in quite a particular way and if you want to use an image sequence as a texture in my you've got to get this bit right so i've got the file name and then it's dot frame number so zero one zero two and then it's dot tj which is the file extension if you didn't have that dot there before the frame number it wouldn't work if you have a dash there it wouldn't work in Maya 2016 it has to be dot frame number dot extension the reason i know this is because i did it slightly differently a way that used to work in Maya 2015 2014 and it made me look full in one of my classes because they've changed it so it has to be named this way so i'm going to double click on that image there and you'll see that that updates the texture to look like that the next thing to do is tell Maya to use the image sequence so at the moment it will just use that static image but you should see that below that there's a tick box that says use image sequence so we tick that box and this little chap here goes purple and what that means is that the number is being controlled by an expression so now if i minimize that and i play this back you'll see that the texture is changing it's an animated texture but at frame 57 it stops which isn't what we need because this animation is going to go beyond frame 57 so the next thing we'll look at is how to get an animated texture to loop which is a very useful thing to do so in order to do this things are going to get ever so slightly technical but stick with me i'll hold your hand through it there's nothing to be afraid of let's just open the hyper shape back up and here is that expression that is controlling the image sequence and what i'm going to do is this little purple box here with 46 in it i'm going to right click and you'll see that there's the option to edit the expression so if we click on that up pops the expression editor which we can use to update the expression to tell me that we'd actually like to loop those 57 frames not just have it come to an end so the edit that we need to make here's the expression here if we put a percentage mark and then the number of frames that we want to loop so i'm actually going to loop 58 frames because although it ends at 57 we need to include double zero as well so there are 58 in total so it'll be file three if that's what yours is called dot frame extension equals frame percentage 58 and then click on edit and by clicking on the edit you've updated the expression and you can then close the expression editor at this point everything should work beautifully so let's go back to frame one press play and see whether or not Maya wants to keep this looping forever oh oh it's working yes so there we go we've now got a much more dynamic looking monitor because we've got something animated on there and that's going to keep looping just like everything else in the scene right here in this step we're going to add a new camera to the scene and we're going to create a new camera movement which is actually the one that we're going to render we're going to create something that's slightly more advanced and dynamic and to do that we're going to add a nicer camera a more advanced camera that gives us more control right so to do that we're in the perspective view we're going to go to create cameras and this time we're going to choose camera and aim so if i do that and then i'm just going to switch my move tool and move the camera out of the floor if i just frame that up you can see that now here's the camera just like the previous camera that we used but this time there's a little thing over here what is that well that is the aim so where would the previous camera to get it to rotate we had to rotate the camera this time if i move the camera up and down you can see that it aims at that little dot which is really useful so it's actually the rotation value has been controlled by the aim same goes for this one if i move the aim up and down the camera stays stationary but it is rotating to follow the aim which again is really useful the way i think of these cameras is working is if you imagine you're playing a first person shooter moving the camera represents the the left thumb stick so that's kind of your position and the aim represents the right thumb stick which is what you're looking at or what you're pointing you're going at so you can keyframe both the camera and the aim to get a more dynamic shot which is what we'll go for now so let's get this set up this time i want to be able to see through this camera so instead of shot camera i'm going to click on panels perspective and i'm not going to rename this one i'll just be a little bit lazy and i'm just going to leave it called camera one and what i want to do now is set up this shot it's going to be a similar shot to the last one but it's going to be more better do you hear me better so let's do that click on the camera so i'm going to leave the aim where it is for the moment and i'm just going to move the camera hello i'm going to try to i'm just going to move the camera back into that back corner of the room and i just want to make sure that i'm happy with the the height of the camera as well so i'm going to put that about there and then i'm going to get the aim so i select that and i'm going to put that where i want it so i want that to be kind of focusing on the projector and move it down as well so it's looking at the screen why am i having a look at the screen because i spent all that time putting the animators extra on it and i would like to show it off in my final render so that is my first position so let's set some keyframes on that so i'm going to click on my camera and i'm going to press s making sure i'm on frame one of course and then i'm going to click on the aim so i just clicked on that line there to get the aim because if i'd have just tried to click on the aim it's in the middle of all this nonsense here i would have clicked something else so i just clicked on this line and that will give me the aim and i'll press s so that's the start position set so now let's move to frame 200 and then i'm going to click the camera first of all move this along the back wall so that it's in a similar position to the last camera and then i'm going to press s and at that stage if i move you'll see that i've got a really similar camera shot to what i had going on with the with the shotgun but there's obviously a bit of a flaw with this shot and you can see whilst i am showing off that sexy animated texture which is nice but now we can't see that the planets are animated what an idiot so what we'll do is we'll click on the aim we'll try to there we go and then on frame 200 what i'm going to do is move the aim up so that it's looking pretty much at the center of the sun so that should be a much nicer looking shot when i press s to set the second keyframe so let's just make this full screen and then we'll play that and see what it looks like so over time the camera is also looking up following the aim and it ends looking on the solar system i think that looks much better don't you of course you do a stupid question okay stop and the next step we'll look at how you actually export your animation from Maya to a beautiful rendered sequence and we'll do that through a process called batch rendering in this step we'll take a look at how you go about setting up for a bat render which is the process of getting your scene in Maya rendered out to a sequence of frames or video that looks beautiful and sexy so as with most things in Maya the first thing you need to do is get the settings right so where the render settings live is just this icon here so we'll give that a click and we've just got to get a few things set up so the first thing that i always change is the image format now it starts on Maya if which is a nice image format and there's nothing wrong with it other than the fact that no other application that found will open the bloody things so let's make sure that they're in a much friendly format that things like adobe premiere photoshop whatever other applications can work with so the one i like is target dot tga the reason i like it is because i've used it and it hasn't yet given me any problems that's enough for me so let's go with target the next thing you need to change is this frame forward splash animation extension it's set to name dot ext it's wrong the reason we know it's wrong is because this little chappy here in bracket says single frame we need to render out multiple frames so anything that says single frame probably isn't what we want so let's click on that and we're going to choose the next one down name dot hash extension which will be rendered out as name dot frame number dot extension one thing i would say to you is whichever one of these you choose make sure that it ends with dot extension if it doesn't and you're working on a windows machine then windows won't know what to do with those files because they want to know what application opens a dot three two eight file so make sure that ends in extension so i like this one here name dot number dot extension this thing here frame padding basically means how many zeros to put before the frame number i've never needed to go above four yet so i just leave that as standard this bit at this stage is quite important the frame range now you're probably thinking we've done 200 frames so what she is going to type in here is start frame one end frame 200 and you'd be wrong because batch rendering if you're doing a big project can take a lot of time and you might set a batch render up and go away leave it for 30 hours come back only to realise that you've rendered the wrong camera i speak from experience you know i thought that i could just leave a project rendering go to the pub come back slightly inebriated and everything will be finished and i was wrong because i'd rendered the perspective camera and not the camera and animated uh and i nearly missed the deadline on that one so it's always a good idea to just do a test render first so i'm gonna leave it from one to ten just to make sure everything's working properly the next thing we need to check is that we're rendering the right camera and here is where i fell foul um previously so renderable camera purse nope we want it to be camera one you could do shotgun if you're particularly fond of that shot but i'm doing camera one because it's more better okay presets um basically set this to whatever you want for me for my purposes hd 720 is fine but you can see there are higher ones there you can go to 1080 there's a 4k preset in here or you could set it manually by typing your width and height in these boxes the next thing we need to do is look in the my software tab and just make sure that we're happy with everything in here so if you've been following my modeling tutorial that got you to this stage then this should already be set up quite nicely you should have ray tracing turned on you should be using at least intermediate quality i'm actually going to up this now to production quality just to make it um the most beautiful list it could be but i'm also going to go down to motion blur and just put a tick in that box i'm going to use 2d motion blur and everything else can stay defaults and that just adds a little extra realism to the shot as things are moving the frames won't look too perfect there'll be a little bit of blur between them and that'll just make things look more believable like they've been shot by a real camera once you've done all that you can click on close and you'll be ready to go for a batch render in order to do that we're going to change the menu set again from animation down to rendering there it is and the option to batch render leaves under render before we do this though i'm going to give you a word of warning make sure your project is set properly at this stage Maya will now when it starts rendering start putting images in the images folder of your project so just to show you where that is in my project folder on my desktop there's my images folder i've already done a test render previously and that's where they sit so i'm just going to overwrite those now with you to make sure that your project is set properly i can close the happy shade now just go to file set project and make sure that it's set to the right place and mine is and then we'll go to render and we're going to go to batch render it will then start rendering with Maya at this stage if you really want to see the progress how it's working this section of Maya is telling you where it's at you can also click on this icon here which opens a script editor and what this will do is show you the progress so you can see at the moment it's rendering frame one and it gives you a percentage of how far it is through frame one so that's frame one finished it's now moving on to frame two i'll give me a percentage of that there we go and it'll keep doing that until i've got all 10 frames done so i will see you once they're complete so here we are again my render is just completed as you can see here result rendering completed and i can open that file there if i want to for information i've never opened that file up maybe it is useful but i've never used it okay so i'm going to close my script editor now and in this step we're going to talk about how you preview your animation so as i'm sure you've noticed we've rendered out a bunch of frames which is still images uh and you're thinking why haven't we rendered to video and i'll tell you why that is the case we've not rendered to video because if you're doing a really big scene let's say you're doing 3000 frames rendering can fail sometimes and if it fails on any of those frames you lose the entire the entire file the entire video file it becomes corrupt it's unusable with frames however if it fails on frame 2091 then the only frame that you lose is usually 2091 you delete that one and you start your next render from 2091 so you don't lose as much time rendering can be a really really lengthy process and you want to make sure that you use that time as well as possible so it is much more efficient to render to frames than it is to video but then you've got the problem of how do i view these frames so let's have a look at that the way i'm going to do it is i'm going to search for an application that is it comes with Maya it's installed with it it's called f check and i'm guessing it stands for frame check which is a good name because that's exactly what it's for so i'm going to open this up and it looks like an application that belongs on windows 95 look ugly is that really ugly um windows version 6.2 i don't think it is far it's windows 8 okay so now we're going to open that animation sequence so we'll do that by clicking on file now there are two options open image or open animation if you click on open image it's not going to play as an animation i would hope that's obvious but i'll say it so if you want to open animation click on open animation there we go so open animation and then we've got to navigate to where we've saved those images so into the images folder and to get it to play just click on frame one and click on open and what it will do is then preview those 10 frames on the loop and what that tells me is a few things first of all that it's rendered the right camera second of all that there's a little render artifact there that might need investigating uh just those two things really but i'm quite happy with it so i'm now happy to render out the full sequence so let's go back in change those settings and get the entire sequence rendered so close that into Maya into the render settings window and the only thing we need to change is the start and end frames so you might be tempted to set the start frame leave it at one and just set the end frame to 200 but why on earth would you want to waste your time that you've already put into rendering we've already got the first 10 frames so let's make the start frame frame 11 see thinking mate thinking okay so we can close that and then we'll render out the rest of the animation so we're going to go to render patch render and Maya will now render the rest of the animation out okay we're basically done with this tutorial now but as a bonus because i know not everybody has the software to convert rendered frames into video in the next step i will show you how to render to video if you've got no option and then we'll wrap things up right then in this step what we're going to look at is how you batch render to video in Maya 2016 so in order to do that we're just going to go straight into the render settings window and the thing that we need to change to get a video out of this instead of still frames is the image format so we're going to change that away from target and we're going to go for avi if you're using a mac you're probably going to choose quick time but i'm on windows today so it'll be avi give that a click and then the option it gives you is compression so we're going to click on that and for me it's important that the compressor i use is full frames uh you can if you want to choose any of these compression methods you may have more or less than i have installed on your system but what i would say is that avi compression tends to be shocking uh so if you don't if you can afford the storage if you've got somewhere to save a large avi file to try and avoid compressing it if you've got no choice have a play with the compression see if you can get something you like if you get something that does look nice then drop me an email because i'm always willing to learn if there is you know some good avi compression out there it'd be useful for me to know um but once you've set that you're basically good to go so click on okay make sure you start and then frames are set um again it might be worth doing a test render of 10 frames before you render out the whole thing to make sure that you're happy with the video quality you're getting um and then click on close and to render out his video click on render and that render and when it's finished this will drop your avi file into your images folder of your project just like it would if it was still images okay so that brings us to the end of my animation tutorial i hope you found it useful if you have them by all means leave a comment in the comment section below and let me know if you've created something that looks really nice send me a copy of it i do like to see those things if you want to continue learning animation then you can check out my tutorial on using motion paths and that link should be on screen now hey or if you want to learn about the theory underlying 3d animation and 3d graphics in general then have a look at the playlist i've created on those which you can go by following the link here or or in the description below of course if you've made it to the end of the video then i can only assume that you've liked it if that is the case then please hit that like button it does help me out it helps other people to find these videos uh and hopefully it helps me get to the top of the uh the youtube search rankings as well yes bring it on and that's it thank you for watching please subscribe and i will see you in my next tutorial video whenever the hell i get time to make it bye