Beginner Questions on Animation in Maya

AdrianST

Hello all.

I am just beginning to get into animating in Maya. Actually to be honest, its my first time using Maya at all. I grabbed a model (.dae) format from models-resource which is already rigged and was hoping to practice some things with it. Well the first problem I encountered was that the skin targets/controllers are all clumped up together and oversized, making it a pain to pick out individual ones. Is there a way to fix this?

Also if anyone has any good tutorials for getting started in Maya(Mostly Animating) then I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!

Brian "Panda" Choi

We'll need more specifics.

Do you literally just want to animate in a 3D package of some sort?

Or rig AND animate?

Or just animation in Maya, including using curves, keyframing, etc?

As well, I want to ask what's you're background coming into all of this?

antweiler

With a collada (.dae) model, all you could get is a mesh, that is skinned to a skeleton. This is not a proper rig, unless you want to animate all bones directly. It could be, that your bones are displayed to big. In this case, either select your bones and check the radius settings or go to Display -> animation -> Joint size.
However, if you want to start animating without going too deep into rigging, get a free rig, or an autorigging script, there are plenty good ones for free.
But you definitely need to study the basics of Maya, if you want to use this software efficiently over the long run (press F1)

AdrianST

JadeEyePanda wrote: »

We'll need more specifics.

Do you literally just want to animate in a 3D package of some sort?

Or rig AND animate?

Or just animation in Maya, including using curves, keyframing, etc?

As well, I want to ask what's you're background coming into all of this?

I've animated in 3DSMax before so I know the basics of keyframe animation. I'm mainly a programmer and am trying to delve into the art side of game development to work on my project.

I have heard Maya is best for animation, though I don't know what in particular puts it above 3DS Max. One of my main reasons for using Maya is the UE4 Animation and Rigging Toolkit, as well as it having a lot of tutorials out on the net.

antweiler wrote: »

With a collada (.dae) model, all you could get is a mesh, that is skinned to a skeleton. This is not a proper rig, unless you want to animate all bones directly. It could be, that your bones are displayed to big. In this case, either select your bones and check the radius settings or go to Display -> animation -> Joint size.
However, if you want to start animating without going too deep into rigging, get a free rig, or an autorigging script, there are plenty good ones for free.
But you definitely need to study the basics of Maya, if you want to use this software efficiently over the long run (press F1)

Thanks. I could use an autorig but I'd lose a lot of the nice face controllers. Also does Maya support bone scaling? Example scaling a character's fist to become huge during a punch.