Subtitles of the Movie

Now let's cover a few other tips that you can use when you're setting key frames. So to start, I'm going to use a nurb sphere to create a little ball, and instead of grabbing it off the shelf this time, there's a setting that I want to change here. Under the Create menu in the main menu, Nurbs Primitives, and there's a check box here for interactive creation. I'm going to turn that off. You can see now when I go back to Create Nurbs Primitives, Sphere, I get a ball built right in the middle of the scene here without having to go through the interactive creation, dragging out the sphere. So this is a personal choice; it's actually just what I'm used to from previous versions of Maya. And so that's what I'm going to stick with. All right, so I have a ball here, and with this ball selected, I'm actually going to change its name. If you look in the top of the Channel Box here, it's named Nurb Sphere 1. I'm going to click on that name with your left mouse button and type in a new name, press Enter. So now I have an object called Ball. Next, I'm going to raise this up above the ground and set a key frame. Last movie we looked at using the S key to set a key frame. I'm going to show another one, which is in this case, to highlight the only channel that I plan on animating, is the Y channel. I'm going to bounce this up and down. So if I selected that channel by name in the Channel Box, and now I can right click. I get a drop down menu. I'm going to choose Key Selected. So that just keyed the translate Y channel, and now I'm going to move forward to about frame 12 and translate this back down so it's touching the ground. Now I'm going to repeat the key frame process, right clicking on the translate Y channel, key selected. If I scrub the timeline here, I can see the interpolation, just dropping it down to the ground. And what I'd like to do is create a loop. If I play this right now you'll see that it bounces or jumps up to the top position. So what I'd like to do is key frame this one more time with the ball back in the top position. Rather than eye-balling this and possibly getting a little hiccup at the end or a hitch when this hooks up at the end, I'm going to do a little trick, which is done by clicking on with the left mouse button the first frame in the timeline in this case, and this would work for whatever frame you're trying to copy. So I'm going to head to that frame, and now instead of left mouse dragging, which would do this, scrub the timeline, I'm going to middle mouse drag. You'll notice when I'm middle mouse dragging, I'm moving forward through the time slider, but I'm not updating anything in the scene. So this way, I've gotten to the frame 24, but I haven't seen the ball drop down yet. So I've middle mouse dragged, release on frame 24; that means I've got the ball exactly where it was at the beginning, and now I'll key frame this and head up to the Channel Box. I've got Translate Y selected, right click, key selected. Now if I play, I get a nice looping animation of that ball moving up and down.