Autodesk Maya 2020 Character Animation-E-BOOK

Autodesk Maya 2020 Character Animation-E-BOOK

Before you animate the characters and objects in your scene, set up the scene by rigging all your
characters and by applying the appropriate constraints and deformers to all the objects you want
to animate.
Rigging a character, also known as character setup, involves creating skeletons and IK handles
for your characters, binding skins to the skeletons, and setting up deformers and constraints. You
can also create deformers for your character and animate them to produce effects; for example,
the jiggling belly (jiggle deformer), furrowing brow (wire deformer), and flexing biceps (lattice
deformer) of a sumo wrestler model.
Non-character objects are also very important to bringing your scene to life. You can limit and
control the transformations of objects by constraining them to characters or other models in your
scene. You can also create deformers for objects to create complex deformation effects. For
example, you can apply a squash deformer to the model of a ball and then parent constrain the
ball to the hands of a character. With this setup, you can key the weights of the character’s hands
and the squash deformer’s attributes to create an animation of the character bouncing the ball
from hand to hand while the ball squashes on the ground and stretches as it rises back into the
air.
In addition to setting up characters and objects for animation, you can set up
Maya® Dynamics™ for animation. You can constrain dynamic objects such as particle emitters,
fields, and fluids to objects or characters in your scene. For more information, see nDynamics
Simulation Framework and Fluid Effects.