Polygon surface's can be manipulated by modifying the vertex points, edges, and faces.
Three types of mesh types to create models from.
Subdivs can have the level of detail moved up and down to supplement the needs of the modeler.
Most anything that you construct in Maya that will move and behave in a particular way needs controls for an animator to grab on to and manipulate to make a performance. Rigging is the method by which this is achieved. When rigging a mesh, a bone structure must be created in a way that it allows the mesh to move in a way that looks believeable. A humanoid or animal skeleton has a bone rig that allows it to move, speak, and emote so that you can connect with the story it's trying to tell. Likewise, things like vehicles, trees, and rope all need to be rigged to be used and react to their environment truthfully to its nature. The tools for creating joints, can be found under the Skeleton menu under the Animation mode. Inverse Kinetic (IK) handles can be added to help move a group of joints. Skinning binds the mesh to the skeleton and the measure of influence a joint has on the area of vertex points closest to it is appropriated. This has to massaged a bit using the painted weights tool to give and take a percentage of control to the joints to create convincing squash and stretch of the mesh. On top of that, various handles, scripts, constraints, and controls are added to help the animator control the character or object authentically without worrying about stepping out of bounds. Rigging is a lot like building the inner workings for a robot or puppet and lends itself to the artist that loves to recreate the mechanics of how things move.
Rigging a mesh is a lot like building a mechanism to be moved by an animator.
After rigging your character the next step is to make it come alive. Maya 2011 offers a multitude of ways of creating your movement as well as refining the performance. Transform attributes for any object selected can be modified and set in time on the timeline. Even attributes from different nodes and parameters like deformers and shaders can be have keys set so that different effects can transition over time. Once you have your movement laid out, editors such as the Graph Editor, Dope Sheet, and Trax Editor allow you to focus on either changing individual attributes or entire sequences that have previously been assembled. Tweaking the curve of a selected translation or stretching the amount of time it takes to do a particular body movement using the animation editors is a powerful way of refining a performance to perfection
The graph editor and dope sheet are two tools you can use to refine your animation.
