As an animator, the timeline is one of your most important tools. Although we will only be going over the basics in this post, I encourage you to explore the timeline further and look into all of its features.
The Timeline
Frame Range
The timeline is located at the bottom of the maya window and shows you information based on frame number. By default, the timeline will be set to 24 frames/second, which is standard in the animation industry. The timeline will also be set to show frames 1-120.
You'll also notice that there's a slider bar below the timeline. This tells you how many frames will be played back when you hit the play button. By dragging on each end, you can adjust how much of your frame range can be viewed at one time. This is useful when animating if you want to play back a specific section of your animation.
To change your visible frame range, you can use the two boxes on either side of the slider bar. The boxes on the left allow you to set your start frame and the boxes on the right set the end frame. And in each pair, the boxes that are farthest away from the center of the screen allow you to set the overall timeline length, where as the other boxes set the values for the slider bar, aka. the visible frames.
Creating Keyframes
The timeline allows you to set what are called "keyframes" on an object, which save the object's position, orientation, scale, etc on a given frame. To set a keyframe, make sure you're on the frame in your timeline where you want to save the key, then select your object and hit the "s" key. This will save all of the object's current information in the channel box. You can also set a key on specific values only by selecting those attributes in the channel box then right clicking and choosing "Key Selected". These attributes will turn red when keyed, and a red tick will appear in the timeline where you saved the key.
To play back your animation, you can use the buttons on the right side of the screen. These allow you to play, stop, skip from one keyframe to the next, move frame by frame, or skip to either the beginning or end of the frame range.
There is also an auto key button on the right hand side that you can toggle on and off. When this is on, once you've set a keyframe on an object, you no longer need to click the s key again whenever you change that objects position on your current frame or any other frame. I personally love this feature and recommend trying it out!
Playback Settings
There's also a button on the bottom right of the Maya window for your playback settings, which will allow you to change your playback speed. You can either use one of the presets or create a custom one.
Specifically, take note of the Play Every Frame option. This feature can be useful if your computer is having a hard time playing back the animation because the scene is very heavy. If your computer is skipping a bunch of the frames in order to reach the set frame rate, you can switch to this playback speed and it will make sure to play every frame back to you at the fastest rate that it can. However, keep in mind that this means your animation may be playing back slower or faster than it would at its final frame rate.
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