Project Overview: The Solar System

This project focuses on familiarizing you with the fundamentals of navigating Maya, object creation, hierarchy, and pivots, all of which are important concepts for scene manipulation and animation within Maya. In this exercise, you’ll create and animate a simple simulation of our working Solar System. (You may have done this in school using coat hanger wire and Styrofoam balls.) This time-tested tutorial is great practice for getting used to object creation, hierarchies, scene manipulation, UI navigation, and working with objects and selections. It will show you how to set up hierarchies and give you experience in working with the proper nodes within a group to create hierarchically layered animation.