Keyframing, bouncing and going forward.

I started working with the ball, now it's supposed to be moving. A lot of good problems and solutions.

I got a good feel about what happens in the graph editor when I move the ball. This ball exercise was very clear, so it was relatively easy to understand the keyframebusiness. X, Y and Z, positions and scale what I needed. 

Firs it was hard to get the keyframes to match each others positions, so that change in X starts at the same time than change in Y, for example. But then I found the snap-tool, which logically helped there. A lot.

Here is one problem I haven't figured out yet. How to copy keyframes? So that I would be able to return the object exactly to its original size. Maya didn't work how I supposed it to work, while I paste the copied key, maya doesn't put the original value, it inserts the value of the last key. Figure below.

A workaround: I first made the first and last frame. So they are the same. And only after this I started creating and manipulating the frames between. Works. Or I could try to copy and paste the exact values of the first frame.. And now when I wrote this, this feels like a more logical approach.

Below is the keys of my bouncing ball advancing in space. I learned that if there is spline, or curves in the X or Z keys, the bouncing is not linear. SO, the X and Z should be linear! Very nice, now it's exact and how I wanted.

Controlling the bounce is the first time I started to use different observation method. When the animation is technically in place, I started to fine tune it. And here is the point where it gets very exciting.
For instance, I get a feeling that the ball is hanging in the air a bit while bouncing. What to do?

I found that there is 3 controls to try to fix this. Figure below.

Control 1 is saying how fast the ball leaves the ground. 2 the opposite. And the third control says, how long is the ball going to stay in the air. I could adjust it a bit, and see from the preview what happens. Is the adjustment taking it to right or wrong direction? Maybe overdo it, so take the keyframes extremely far away from each other and learn what this does to the animation.

This is exactly where I want to dig in while learning maya. Of course, first I have to learn all the technical sfuff, so I don't bumb into any hard problems while staying in the fine tuning section.

And one hard(weird) problem is rendering. I managed to render tiff-sequence out before, when I told my firewall not to block maya batch render. Yesterday it didn't work though the firewall was told not to block maya. I pushed batch render, it didn't start, closed maya, opened maya and pushed the batch render again. And again, and again. Suddenly it started rendering some batch, what seemed like a few batches pushed together. Had to shutdown my computer to stop that madness.