Another Dimension: Maya - Learning Movement

As sessions follow up, we begin to get more and more intricate with Maya, as during today's session we learned additional conventional tools that exact the notion of movement and animation through Maya, in contrast to the last ones where we just learned the manipulative tools and the basics of creating shapes and models. Following up and referencing the notes I had made from the previous sessions, I had no difficulties keeping track with what was being taught, and even more so I managed to proliferate my notes with some more useful shortcuts and functions. Primarily, this session taught us the basics of animating with Maya, beginning with the placement of keyframes (s - set keyframe) and how the manipulation of objects interacts with keyframes as Maya animates the in-betweens. Be it rotation, scaling, or movement, I've learned that Maya can coherently process information in terms of animating "tweens" (as they are called in Flash). Furthermore, I was introduced to the Animation tab of tools, where one can create a motion path and attach an object to it so that it follows a distinct pathway and not one generated automatically through Maya's in-betweens. However, for me personally, the most important part of this session was the Deformers which give an object the flexibility of distortion, be it a warp, a curvature, or a twist. All based on loop edges which give an object interactive vertexes, the Deformers work in such a logical way that everything can be controlled manually through coefficients (for example, degrees in curvatures). Come to think of it, the whole software is profusely logical in such a mathematical way that the more you know the more logical it becomes - something that I personally value. Touching up a bit on the manipulation of pre-made models, the next challenge is creating a walk cycle based on the actual conventions of human motion - weight, leaning, position, and joint points. For the cycle that I shall need to make, I will reference the Animation Survival Kit's section on flexible and flowing walk movements so that Moom does not seem like a robot, but instead, a human.

Screenshots I took just in case I forget the process