Animating for Games - Game Character Development with Maya - page 950

The five Tangent buttons are (left to right) Spline, Clamped, Linear, Flat, and Stepped.
Clicking on these will apply a particular tangent to the whole curve or to the selected keys.
Tangents are discussed in a later section.
After the tangent buttons are two Buffer Curve buttons. The first one allows you to store
the current curve in a buffer. You can then make changes, enable View > Show Buffer
Curves to display the buffered curve in gray, and compare the new curve with the buffered
curve. If you want to revert back to the stored curve, click on the second button, Swap
Buffer Curve.
Next on the toolbar are two tangent-editing tools. The first, Break Tangents , lets you edit
the in and out tangents for each key individually. The Unify Tangents button will fix this
break, so if you manipulate the in tangent of a curve, the out tangent will also be affected.
All tangents are unified by default.
Next to the two tangent-editing buttons are the Free Tangent Weight and Lock Tangent
Weight buttons. By default, all curves are created nonweighted; this means you can only
edit the tangents vertically—the handles will only move up and down, pivoted around the
key. When the tangents are weighted, you have complete freedom over where the handles
can be placed; that means you can move them horizontally as well as vertically, adding
more weight to each key. To convert a nonweighted curve to a weighted one, select the at-
tribute in the list on the left in the Graph Editor and go to Curves > Weighted Tangents.
Note
If you prefer, you can change your general animation preferences to make
weighted tangents the default rather than nonweighted.
Now that we have an understanding of some of the Graph Editor's tools, let's get some
exposure to working with animation curves and tangents. You should still have
Cube_Example.mb open, along with the Graph Editor.
1. In Maya's main view, select the first cube, named Cube_Spline.
Figure 16.7a shows the Graph Editor with the selected cube listed on the left.
Below this is a list of all the cube's attributes that have animation applied to them.
Currently only the Translate Z attribute has animation applied.