Subtitles of the Movie

I'm going to create a new scene here so that we can take a look at Key Frame Animation. I'll start off in my surfaces shelf and click on the Nurbs Tours Creation icon. Drag out a little ring here and press 5 to go to shaded mode, and then use the Scale tool, scale this down on Y to a little Frisbee. Okay and I'm going to select the Translate X, Y, and Z channels and zero these out so that this thing is perfectly centered in the scene. This'll be the starting point for setting my animation key frames. Animation in Maya is defined as setting a value and key framing and it then setting a new value and key framing it at a different point in time. So I'm selecting this time slider down at the bottom and my start frame is going to be Frame 1, so I can bring this to the front, select my object, and press S on the keyboard to key frame it. So when I do that, just pressed S, I can see all the channels light up orange to show me that this object has key frames on it. I also get a result of ten as a sort of cryptic message down here at the bottom, and this tells me that ten channels, which are the X, Y, Z for translate, rotate, and scale have been keyed as well as visibility. Now I'll move to a new point in the timeline. So head here to frame 24, which is one second of animation if we're working at 24 frames per second, and select the object. I'll translate it to a new position. I can also rotate that and maybe I'll also scale it, and now I'll press S on the keyboard, and now I've set a second key frame for all of those channels. So this means that I have a start position that looks like this on translate, rotate, and scale. And I'll click directly on frame 24, and that's going to be my end position. So these are the two key frames that I've created and now the interpolation is created by Maya for all of the in between frames, so as I drag the time slider here, you can see that it interpolates every position between that start and end for translation, rotation, and scale. If I press Play over here in the playback controls, you can see I have this one second loop of that Frisbee taking off, rotating a little bit and scaling. I'll press Stop there. Now I'll place a new key frame, let's say somewhere in the middle. So I've just scaled the object and I'll press S. You can see now it's going to interpolate from the first frame position, rotation scale. The second key frame, which is on frame 13 in time and the final one on frame 24. So I'll play that back, and let's say I decide I don't like this key frame here on frame 13, I can right click on the time slider, hold that right mouse button down and choose Delete from this drop down menu. And that just got rid of that key frame, so now I'm back to interpolating between the first and second key frames, which are on frame one and on frame 24.