Tip of the Week: Camera Switching

I recently stumbled upon a shortcut for switching cameras in the viewport. Normally, you go up to the Panels heading on the Panel Menu Bar and chose the camera that you want from the drop down menu. You can also use the marking menu to select the default start-up cameras (persp, top, front, side), but if you wanted to use this to select other cameras, you would need to setup a custom marking menu and connect it to a MEL or Python script that queries the cameras in your scene... a tutorial for another day.

In any case, the new trick that I found is pretty cool. If you middle mouse drag a camera from the outliner into the 3D viewport, the view will switch to that camera. Simple as that.



If you have a lot of cameras in your scene, and you're switching around a lot while animating, it can be a pretty nice shortcut.

Tip of the Week: Relative Transformations

Here's a trick for modifying attributes in the channel editor in Maya. Rather than typing in values, you can use math operations to apply relative transforms.

Let's say you have a cube with the scale values

Scale X = 1.084
Scale Y = 9.23
Scale Z = 2.713

and you want to scale it up by exactly three.

Rather than breaking out the calculator and entering the answers in manually, you can just type *=3 into the channel box, and the cube will scale up by 3 in XYZ. You can use +=, -=, /=, or *=. You can also use percentages. For example, 50 +=20% will give you 60.



This is often useful when you're modeling and need to enter precise values. But it also comes in handy from time to time for any kind of precise animation.