Subtitles of the Movie

What I have here is a NURB sphere that I have added control points to and modeled into a sort of vague arm shape, and I wanted to show that models or NURB’s geometry can be arranged into these organic shapes. And ultimately when you do create a character, that's how you do it. And that you can install skeletons inside geometry, and animate skins using the skeleton. So I am just going to go and draw a skeleton inside there and now I will select the skin and the skeleton, and I am going to smooth bind the skin. Now you'll notice that the skin deforms as I rotate the skeletal joints. And this is really how all the character creation does works in Maya just that you put the skeleton inside a NURB’s mesh or a polygon mesh, and setup the manner in which the skeleton influences the points of the skin. So I thought I would show you just a little bit of animation before we moved onto the next section. So at frame 0 here, I am going to take the skin and move it back here, and I am going to set an initial keyframe. And now I'll move forward 10 frames and move the top joint - I am working with the top joint of the hierarchy here. Now I am going to go forward to frame 20, bring the skin down. Now I am going to go forward to frame 30, bring the skin up and now I am going to go to frame 1. And I have created this sort of animation, a little kind of hopping. Now let's add some rotation animation to the joints, at this first keyframe I am going to rotate the skin back for both joints, and I will set keyframes there. Now I am going to go forward to the next keyframe for the movement of the top joint, and I'll rotate these two joints to create a different sort of position further on. Now let's go back and you'll see that we have kind of an interesting little swinging motion. Now I'll go to frame 20 and let's set some more rotation keyframes for these two joints. Now we'll have the arms swing up and then swing back, let's go to frame 30 now, and I'll swing this joint forward and this joint forward here, and set these keyframes, let's scrub back. And now we'll go to frame 41 and enter our final rotation keyframes for these joints. And it looks like those are a little bit after the motion has stopped, but let's take a look. And this is the basis for understanding character animation in Maya - which is that you create organic meshes, organic skins using all of the modeling tools. And then you install skeletons, get the skeletons to drive the skin in particular way and then you animate the skeletons.