Faulty by design?

[Antonio_S]

Hi - I'm new here.

Just want to congratulate you all on a wonderful concept, wonderful turorials and not such a bad website! Same too to Autodesk/Alias in Making learning not only free and seemingly without the usual 30 day expiry period but also downloadable!

Are the tutorials similarly available for online download from DT? - I only ask because my credit card is registered in Italy so when I buy something online I pay tax there - but I live in Argentina so if you ship to Argentina I have to pay tax again! Doing this by download I would only need to pay once!

That said, I have now been using Maya PLE for about a week now - it seems like a wonderful program and as I have no experience of this type of 3-D environment I found your site quite by accident. I have to say it has opened up an entirely new world to me. I have been trying to follow one or two of the free tutorials which have been of great help in trying to get started but I am left puzzled by one or two things:

In Maya for example, the behavior of the move and scale tools in Ver 7 PLE is really strange. In the vidos the constraint handles always appear in the viewports when objects are at a reasonable size, but in my application you have to zoom huge to find one of the handles and often move the object out of view to locate them. I have tried to look at tool settings etc but nothing seems to fix this problem. Does anyone know how to correct this? It seems like this is a big problem

Also I have tried to find in te documantaion what the 3 icons on the right hand side of the channel box refer to - I simply cannot find out what they are - one is like a little Axes icon..... I though that would ix this problem.

I was wondering too if your backwaterbunch prouction series includes a clip of the final project in action? I am kind of half interested in that bundle as it seems like a good place to learn a lot of things in a short time - but I always like to have a look at the end product to see what I am trying to work toward.

I guess thaer are many questions - maybe a million or more in the eyes of a newbie, your free tutorial have answered quite a few already - maybe somebody can help out with these few included here in my post.

Thank you again for being the first port of call for a 3-D virgin such as I. By the looks of it there's so much more there to be explored such as XSI, ZBrush and others......

Saludos

Antonio_S

[LaLiLuLeLo]

YOu can use the numpad + and - to change the handle size...

[Antonio_S]

Thank you very much for this advice! Do you know what the other icons in the channel box are for?

[sunder]

The other icons are for different methods of using the channel box attributes.
The first icon with the axes represents 3 modes :
When its colored, it means that the last selected channel (example: translateX) will change to that tool/handle in the viewport.
When its crossed, it means that selecting channels will not change the current tool/handle.
When its colorless, it opens up to middle-mouse button (MMB) scrubbing or sliding where you can press the MMB and move the mouse from side to side to change values of the selected channels.
It also enables the next two buttons. The one with the dial symbolizes the speed at which the values change and the arrow symbolizes the "acceleration." When it's a straight arrow, the change will be constant but when its curved, it'll start off slow and increase quickly.
Hope this helps. :)

[Antonio_S]

Likewise a big 'Thank You' to you too. I was wonderig what happened to the scrubbing possibilities. Was only able to select Labels rether than values in the channel box and manually scrub in the viewports but not the values themselves ia trh + the Mouce Buttons.

Have you any idea where I can locate more information on this in the Online Help? I searched under channel box, Icons, Constrain handles etc but the information was not of much help. Little tips like this make all the difference!

Thank you once again!

Do you know if the BackwaterBunch Bundle - I think it is called Maya in Production or similar - includes a finished movie to reference to? I am thinking I might want to buy this but it will depend on this and also if it can be downloaded for resons given n my initial post!

[Dj Niine]

to scrub, click your cursor in the value window, hold down the control or alt key and hold down one of the three mouse buttons to scrub, if you have a three button mouse( which is advisable) the three buttons have different speeds or values.

this only works in the value slots in the attributes, you have to use the middle mouse button trick for the channel box!

[dhanashree]

can i get some free maya rigging tutorials here??