Maya Animation Camera Setup

The best way to work with your camera for establishing your framing in Maya is to:

1) Create a new camera and WITHOUT MOVING IT, select it and group it twice.
2) Name the top-level group “TRANSLATE” and lock and hide all the Scale, Rotate, and Visibility attributes
3) Name the second level group “ROTATE” and lock and hide all the Scale, Translate, and visibility attributes
4) Rename the Camera something simple like “theCamera” and lock all of it’s attributes.
5) Once you have your new camera set up, move it with the TRANSLATE group to the location and rotate it into place.
6) In the 4-up view, click in the “Top” window and choose from the menu I think it’s “Panel” (the last menu item) and Look through selected…
7) Then you can move the camera with it’s controls in the persp window and watch how the frame changes in the theCamera window.

NOTE***: DO NOT AT ALL USE THE NORMAL CAMERA MOVE MOUSE CONTROLS LIKE SCROLLING OR ALT + CLICK AND DRAG, ETC. WHILE HAVING YOUR NEW CAMERA WINDOW SELECTED, YOU WILL BREAK THE WHOLE SETUP AND HAVE TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!!!!

If you want to be able to rotate the camera around a central focal point:

1) Select the ROTATE group node in the Outliner
2) Hit Ctrl (Cmd) + G to group it
3) Rename the group FOCAL_POINT
4) Set what you want the focal point to be by hitting Insert to move the pivot point for the FOCAL_POINT group node to the desired point
5) Lock and hide the Scale, Translate, and visibility attributes

Doing this makes animating and positioning the camera much easier to use, and allows you to establish your framing and still move around the scene with the perspective camera in order to animate everything properly.