What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll learn some of Maya's often overlooked tools which if embraced, can help dramatically speed up your workflow. We'll begin by utilizing its dynamics systems to automate the animation of key areas, like the snakes on Medusa's head, while also adding the ability to override the snakes motion, allowing an animator to also pose and hand animate them as well. Once the dynamics are in place, we'll look at MEL, Maya's powerful scripting language, to help create and apply a basic rig to tie all the controls together. Finally we'll look at using nCache as well as baking the dynamics onto the joints so the animation can be exported to a game engine or another application without any loss of data. By the end of this training you'll have the ability to build a controllable dynamic based system into your own characters, or even environments, as well as generate a simple script to help with those repetitive tasks. Software required: Maya 2014.