[b]I'm a new user to Maya. I have version 6.5 and it's a very complex program. What I want to do sounds simple but I'm unsure of how to approach it.
I want to spin a gold coin, you know have it slowly rotate while recording the movement. I want to then create a loop so it continues to spin. Any ideas?
Also, when I create a large land mass and am forming it I can't seem to zoom out far enough to see it all. Is their a "zoom extents" like in AutoCAD?
Another question can you attach sound to an object? You know like a car racing around a track. With the sound attached to say the hood it gets louder as it approaches then fades away in the distance.
Hello, Mike. To create a loop animation is pretty simple. Firstly, model out your gold coin. Then animate the rotation in whatever axis you desire (for example, Y). Say you want it to loop after one second. That's 30 frames (assuming you're using an NTSC framerate). So at frame one set a keyframe on your Y rotation. Then go to frame 31 and set a keyframe on your Y rotation of 180. Then render out frames 1 - 30. Basically, at frame 30 its right before the loop point, so when it loops and plays frame one again its exactly the same as frame 30 - so it loops seemlessly.
Onto your next question. When you create a large piece of geometry you may have to change your camera's clipping planes. Select your camera and go to the attribute editor (CTRL+A) and you'll see under the "Camera Attributes" two boxes for the "Near Clip Plane" and "Far Clip Plane". What Maya does is it automatically turns things off once they get too far or too close -- that saves strain on your graphics card when you're dealing with huge scenes, etc. But if you want to be able to see everything when dealing with a large scale scene, increase your Far Clip Plane.
Lastly, yes you can attach sound in Maya. To do so is as simple as dragging a WAV file into your time slider. However, what you want to do with making sounds louder and quiter is actually editing the audio and Maya isn't an audio editor. The only reason to import sound into Maya is for something like lip syncing or animating along some already-edited soundtrack. There's two ways you can go about the specific example you mentioned with the car sounds. Firstly you can edit your sound track and then import it into Maya and animate to it or secondly, and this will be the easiest way, is to animate your car racing around the track and then take the animation along with the sound effect into an editing program and edit the two together. Good luck!
QUOTE t I can't seem to zoom out far enough to see it all
Go to your camera attributes. there you can set far clipping plane, simply increase it to see further.
About the coin. Get everything to frame 1 and set a key there, then rotate the coin 360 and set another key somewhere (depends on the speed of rotation). The animation is done, now if you replay the video it will loop, but if you want it to loop in maya, not just in the output video, well i cant remember that but i'm sure there is such function somewhere.
QUOTE The animation is done, now if you replay the video it will loop, but if you want it to loop in maya, not just in the output video, well i cant remember that but i'm sure there is such function somewhere.
This is where Pre-Infinity Post-Infinity enters into the game.
Go to Windows->Animation Editors->Graph Editors, select your coin and you will see it's animation graph. In the Graph Editor window go to View->Infinity then go to Curves->Post-Infinity->Cycle if you have a curve that is like a sin or cos curve or if you have something like a pendulum or in your case Cycle with Offset.
