Once you have a model and a nice rig to go along with it, it's time to dive into animating in Maya! The first order of business is to make sure, especially when animating and timing a character's movements, that what we're getting out of our viewport in terms of motion playback is in real time.
Window < Settings/Preferences < Preferences
Under the Categories section and the subheading of Settings, select the Time Slider option.
Change the Playback speed in the dropdown to Real-time [24 fps].
This may not show you every single frame (especially on older, slower computers) but it will force Maya to not take memory into account and to adhere to a strict 24 frames per second playback speed. On older machines with limited memory, this may result in Maya dropping frames in order to stick to the 24 frames per second format.
There are positives and negatives here, the main draw for an animator being that they will know exactly how to time their poses as the frame rate is guaranteed.
Now down to the basics of animating.
We are not going to animate joints or geometry, instead we'll animated the controls our riggers have built for us. For this example I've selected Lilith's wrist control.
Using basic transform tools on the various rig controls, we can pose our characters exactly how we need to. In order to lock this pose to our current frame on the timeline, we need to Key this information. There are several ways we can go about this, on the Channel Box we can shift select only the attributes we want to key (for example, I want to only key the translate information).
With only the attributes we need selected, we can right click and hit Key Selected.
The attributes with keyframes attached will light up pink.
If we don't particularly care which attributes are keyed or not, we can simply select the rig control in question and hit the "s" button on your keyboard. This will key all the attributes at this point in the timeline with no discretion.
On the timeline, all the keyed positions will show up as a red line for each pose/key.
To navigate between set keys or to jump to the nearest key use the Step back/forward one key button.
To select a range of keys on the timeline hold down alt and shift. With these two buttons held, middle mouse button click and drag over the range of keys you wish to alter.
To expand or contract and set of selected keys use the outermost yellow arrows to scale the set of keys in time. This is a useful tool to help you retime established poses.
The innermost yellow arrows in the selection will allow you to drag the selected keys in time without scaling them.
To smooth out and tweak our animation, we'll need to use the Graph Editor.
Window < Animation Editors < Graph Editor
On the left we'll see whatever we have selected, on the right is our animation curves. The black dots are keys and the line going through them shows, for that attribute (for example transformX), the curve of resulting motion.
Selecting a single attribute and hitting the "f" key on your keyboard will frame up that single animation curve.
You can left click and drag across any keys you wish to adjust, this is the curve set to Auto tangents.
Linear tangents.
Step (or pose-to-pose) tangents.
In order to forever loop a set of keys (for example, perhaps we're making a walk cycle), click View < Infinity and check the box.
We'll see the first and last key stretch on into infinity.
To give this infinite curve our same animation over and over, go to Curves < Pre/Post Infinity < and set them to Cycle with Offset.
Now we'll see our same motion repeat itself with no snapback from the crossover from last to first key.
If you are running a slow machine or need a test for dailies, we'll have to render out a quick Playblast. A Playblast is a quick render of exactly what you see in the viewport, no more no less.
First select the view you wish to render.
Next go to Window < Playblast< Option Box
Set your options to reflect your desired render and define the path, then hit Playblast.
There you go, with these basic tools you should be able to accomplish the majority of your animating needs! I hope this quick guide was helpful!
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