2009

Table Of Contents
In this lesson, you learn how to:
Set keyframes for animatable objects and their attributes.
Use the Time and Range slider and Playback Controls to control the
playback.
Use keyboard shortcuts to set keyframes.
Use the Graph Editor to view animation curves.
Modify the animation of objects using the Graph Editor.
Set preferences to increase the playback quality.
Setting the playback range
In this lesson, you work with a scene weve created for your use. In the
following steps, you open the scene and set how long the animation will play.
To open the scene
1 Make sure youve done the steps in
Preparing for the lessons on page 185.
2 Open the scene file named Keyframing.ma.
This file can be found in the GettingStarted directory that you set as
your Maya project.
GettingStarted/Anim/Keyframing.ma
The scene contains a ball object that is currently positioned on the X-axis
near the edge of a ground plane.
To animate the ball, you key its position at different times of the playback
range.
The playback range is defined by the Time and Range slider. The Time
and Range slider controls allow you to playback or scroll through your
animation or move to a specific point in time of your animation so you
can set keyframes.
To set the playback range for the scene
1 Look over the playback controls, as shown in the figure below:
Setting the playback range | 187