Relationships

In this lesson we learned about constraints and sdk, the first thing that I will be talking about are constraints, constraints are basically a way to have on master, which you can transform or translate, which will cause the children of that master to act in a certain way, for example the point constraint tool makes the child translate in the exact  same way that the master does, so if the master moves 10 centimeters along the y axis, the child will do the same, there is a tick box in the tools settings to say whether or not you want the child to be placed on the same position as the master. Another useful type of constraint is the aim constraint tool, which makes the child always aim at, or face the master, this could be very useful for having a camera tracking a ship in an animation. There are many other types of constraints with different functionality, these constraints are:


Parent : translate and rotate relative to where the parents angle.
This could be used to make some interesting shots in Maya, where your ship is rotating, but the camera always stays locked on to on side of the ship.

Orient: rotates the child exactly as the parent rotates.
This could be useful is you had more than one of the same object, such as for planets in a scene, so you could rotate them all, while only having to actually set up the rotation for one.

Scale: scales the child exactly as the parent is scaled.
This would be useful if you had several objects that you needed to rescale at the same time and to the same scale

There are also pole constraints, but that only applies to IK handles, which I do not think I will be using in my animation.

Now I will talk about set driven keys(SDK), SDK's  are extremely useful when it come to creating a reactive animation, for example, as shown in the image above, you can make one object rotate along its Y axis when another is moving along the X axis. This could be used to create some very interesting animations that would have very good flow and could be a very helpful tool in creating an animation.