ABSTRACT
This chapter contains a wide selection of very useful tools and techniques for animating. While creating a piece of animation, animator may call upon some of the techniques dozens of times, but all of them will make a regular appearance in any animator's workflow. Having to press the S key incessantly while animating does two things: it gets tedious and wears out animator's S key. For any kind of inverse kinematics/forward kinematics switching, don't sweat the small stuff until the transition is working. The timeline is the interface element animator will use more than any other when animating in Maya. Use the cheat whenever animator need to closely reference any motion for a cartoony-styled animation. The trax editor, apart from being the best place to import and manipulate audio, was actually built to load animation clips onto character sets. Maya's curve-copying abilities are rather extensive and it offers many options for shuffling animation data around to save time and effort.
