Introduction

This lesson focuses on animating along paths in Maya, and how that can be applied to my own work.

The starter task was to animate a camera to create a simple sequence of a panning shot. Here is my video. I made it by creating a polyplane and extruding some towers out of it, before creating a camera and using keyframes to animate its movement – moving the camera and then making a keyframe.

Animating along a path

Then, I tried animating along a path. To do this, I first drew a path using the pencil curve tool in the Curves/Surfaces menu. Then, I added in a sphere that would move along the path.

Next, I changed the interface from Modelling to Animation in the top left corner of the screen.

I then selected the sphere and the path, and went to the Constrain menu, Motion Paths, Attach to motion path. This attached my sphere to the path and created an animation of the sphere moving along it.

To adjust the motion further, I went to Windows, Animation Editors, Graph Editor.

And this opened the graph editor. From here, I could adjust the motion using keyframes and the Bezier handles. Moving the line below where it was earlier in the graph makes the sphere move backwards along the path. Creating a steep concave curve slows down the movement.

Here is a playblast video of my animation:

Balloon Challenge

The next task was to animate a balloon travelling through an obstacle course without hitting any obstacles. I started by drawing a simple path and attached the balloon to it. I then moved the vertices to follow the path that I wanted the balloon to travel – going under, over and around the obstacles. Playing the animation repeatedly helped me to see where the balloon was hitting the obstacles, and so I could adjust the path and correct as I went along.

Next, I opened the graph editor so that I could time the balloon’s movement to avoid the obstacles.

This was the result:

Finally, I animated a camera the same way as the starter task to create a video of the camera following above the balloon as it travels through the course. Here is the render:

Conclusion

I think that using paths to animate 3d models will be very useful in later 3D work – It can be used to animate vehicles, animals, and anything that moves with a direction.