Chapter 5 - Transformations

Abstract

Transformations are a critical part of Maya and hence, they are covered in detail in this chapter, including their theoretical basis. Any operation that moves, scales, rotates, shears, or projects a point involves a transformation. A transformation is simply a mapping of a point from one place to another. Matrices are a powerful means of combining a series of transformations into a single transformation. Rather than storing the series of transformations, a single transformation matrix can be stored that holds the result of applying all transformations. This single transformation compactly encodes all transformations of which it is composed. The process of combining transformations is called “concatenation,” which is denoted using the multiplication operator (*).Points are transformed using matrix multiplication. The 3D point (x, y, or z) is converted to a 4D homogeneous point (x, y, z, or1), before it is multiplied by the matrix. This point is taken as a row of four elements, and thus, it has a matrix dimension of 1×4.