This tutorial will give you a good idea on how to create a simple ball and make it move across the screen, maybe you think that this is to simple for you, well when I first began I thought the same as you, however we all must start with the basics to progress to much bigger animation such as bone structures, ik handles and even vertex animation.

So to begin with open up maya 7 and let’s make a start,

I have drawn a arrow to the tool we will use to create a sphere quickly, first of all if you don’t see this tool bar I will show you why,

Make sure you have the polygons tool bar open and not one of the other tool bars, right now click the tool that the arrow points to this will create a sphere with what ever default settings your sphere options have, don’t worry if your sphere looks different to this one it doesn’t really matter for this tutorial.

Next step, lets make sure the animation setting are perfect for us, click the tool that the arrow points to below,

This is called the animation preference, it will open this pop up,

Now if your options don’t look like this don’t worry, we need to set it up, change the playback and the animation start/end to 25 we are only going to make this animation 1 second long, (now if you are in America set this to 30).

Make sure that the playback speed is set to real time [numbers], if your real time [25 fps] isn’t 25 do not worry we will set this up next.

Click where the arrow points to Setting and you should have a different screen facing you like the one below.

Change the time to PAL [25 fps] if you live in England or Europe if you live in America or else where change it to NTSC or your local setting that you know.

It is important that you do this every time you start an animation to make sure that the play back speed is perfect for your region, this is very important if you get a job in the industry.

Now click save and the box will go away, now in your time line located at the bottom of the screen, if you have something lie this going on,

1.04 we need to change it to one as it’s not a whole number, in the white box where the longer arrow points select the number and type in 1.0 to reset it back to 1, this as changed because we have changed the settings, but everything is back to normal now.

Select the ball and make sure the time line is on one still and press S, now if you look at your time line you should see that a blue line as appeared on the selected frame like below,

Click on the frame two and you should see something like the image next to it, if you don’t , reselect frame one, press S again, if no luck make sure you don’t have caps lock on and repress S it will work now.

Right now select frame 25 (or 30), once you’re in frame 30 select the ball and press W (making sure caps lock is not on) and move the ball to a new location, once you have moved it press S to create a animation frame.

Once again you will have a red line in frame 25 (or 30) this will tell you that both of these frames are animated, now time to watch the animation click on frame 1 and press the play button, and there you have it a simple move animation, now you know how to do this you can move on to bigger and better animations.