In this chapter, you learned how to start working in Maya by getting around the interface a bit and learning how to navigate the UI. Then, you began working by creating a new project, creating basic objects such as primitives, and placing objects in the scene. You learned how to place pivot points for objects and how to use snaps to place points precisely. You had some experience with the Channel Box and Attribute Editor to set an object’s attributes. You then went on to create simple shaders for your objects and set keyframes to animate a Solar System. You went over object hierarchy and grouping conventions to organize and set up your scene better, and finally you learned how to output a basic playblast video file of your completed animation.
The planet animation you created is based on a system of layering simple actions on top of each other to achieve a more elaborate result. If you work slowly and in segments, animation is more straightforward to produce and generally of higher quality. Much of your time in actual animation, as opposed to setup or modeling, will be spent adjusting the small things. These small things give the scene life and character. You’ll find that finishing 85 percent of a scene will take about 15 percent of the time. The remaining 85 percent of the time goes into perfecting the final 15 percent of the scene.