Have you ever looked at someone and thought, “they have a lot of TY when they walk?” Er, perhaps not if you’re not someone familiar with 3D animation. Back when I first started in animation school, I was completely overwhelmed with the way teachers would refer to your work: more RZ! Less RX! How about some more TY? You soon learn, though, these are ways of expressing how you want the character to move, in terms of Maya (or other animation programs).

The T and R stand for Translate (move) and Rotate; the X, Y, and Z express the direction of the movement (side to side, up and down, and forward and back.) So, if someone really does have a lot of TY in their walk, that means they bounce up and down quite a bit. The reason why you need to think in these terms when you animate is so you can quickly change the motion of your character in an animation graph. The graph is a visual representation of where each part of the character’s body has been told to move, expressed in lines and curves. Each line represents how much to move and in what direction. If you had a graph for your character’s head, and it had a sine wave all the way across it for the value of RY, then this would be representative of the character shaking his head “no”.

That’s one of the major differences between traditional and computer animation. Computer animation is easily edited, thanks to the graph. Just by moving one little graph point, your entire animation can change on a whim. If you were traditionally animating and wanted to make the same sort of change, you’d probably have to scrap your entire work and start over! I love traditional animation, but the ease and efficiency of computer animation can’t be beat. Plus, it really doesn’t hurt to have an undo button.

You just have to get used to viewing the character motion as a graph, and you’ll have it down. Once you’re able to look at a tangle of lines and know this one here is a foot moving forward and that wiggly one over there are hips swaying back and forth, and that entire mess in this region of the graph represents the character dancing like crazy, then you’re on your way to being a computer animator.