Introduction

This lesson introduced our class to cameras in Autodesk Maya. We then used this new knowledge to re-create famous movie shots in the software.

Maya Animation Basics

To start the session, we created a basic animation of a shape moving across the screen in Maya. To do this, we added a keyframe where the sphere was at one end of the screen, then moved the sphere to the other side of the screen and created another keyframe.

Here is the playblast:

Note: the keyboard shortcut Alt + V can be used to playback the animation in Maya

Animating a Camera

Next, we practised animating a camera in Maya. I created a simple city-like environment for my camera to move through, and then I created a camera and selected it. Animating the camera was very similar to animating the sphere: all I had to do was move the camera as I wanted, and then add in a keyframe at the end of every key movement. Here is the playblast:

Re-creating a Scene

The next task was to re-create this scene from Titanic using the camera in Maya. The clip lasts about 10 seconds.

As you can see, I got the basic camera movements down, but had a bit of trouble trying to model the ship and characters on the front. I think that improving on this would just be through practising 3D modelling enough to where I’m confident in making quick models on my own.

Conclusion

Over all, this lesson introduced me to animating and cameras in Maya, which are essential skills for learning the software as well as in 3D animation in general.