The Legendary Graph Editor

Okay, i've not been using Maya for long but always here a lot about using the graph editor to refine your animation, i think in the time i have used Maya i've used the graph editor about 3 times, and still not exactly knowing what its all about, the book "how to cheat Maya" by Eric Luhta reads "Maya's Graph Editor is easily it's most powerful and most used tool for animating. It's likely that you will spend much of your time working with it, so its a no-brainer that we learn all the ins and outs of this fantastic editor".

for this tutorial I will be using “how to cheat maya” because at this point in time I have no solid animation for my final project with Mike so I think its easier to go a long with this tutorial.

Okay so for this tutorial they have given me a ball with a control handle below is what we have in the graph editor when I click the control, and the second picture is the ball itself.

and if I playblast the file this is what I get

what im going to do now is follow the tutorial and see what results I can come up with to see if we can make this ball bounce any smoother!

I also learnt this useful skill where you can mute translation, this is what happens when I mute translate X

when a translation is muted the line in the graph editor becomes dotted shown in the screenshot below:

Okay within the tutorial I am told to change files, im now given a ball with no translate Y or translate Z I believe this is what I am about to be working on to make the ball bounce.

okay so then im asked to experiment a bit with the why translation and set some keys i've come up with this (I also set my tangents to linear)

Okay I know from recent tutorials and lessons that the shape below is the general gist of what I should be going for in the graph editor for a bouncy ball, its a little bit messy but hopefully when I playblast ill get a good enough result.

and this is the playblasted clip.

Okay Ive decided that there are way too many keys in my ball bounce so i've started again, but now the lines look much smoother in the graph editor

this is what it looks like

INSERTSMOOTHLINESPLAYBLAST

I then decided to play about with the rotate Z (as instructed by the tutorial) and it took me a few go's to understand what way it went but it actually is fairly simple, this is how it looks in the graph editor...

and this is my final playblast I think it works really well and im quite proud!