Quick Select Sets

Before starting Animation, we need to make sure we have access to all the controls.
Often Animators make shelf buttons, but Maya have always had another, excellent tool for it - Quick Select Sets. Let's open Outliner.  Then Create/Sets/Quick Select Set and tear off "Sets".
Then in the camera view, Shift+select Torso controls. I prefer to start with the Head and go down to Hips. With controls selected click on Quick Select Set and in the dialog box, enter Quick Select Set name: I recommend to give it a name "Set1_Torso".

Click OK and look at the Outliner.

We can see new item Set1_Torso with a "+" in it. Click on the "+" to open the set. We see Spine controls. Now even when the character is positioned like below

We still can access all of it's controls in any order we need.

Continue with Arms, Legs, Hands and Face.
We should end up with long list of Quick Select Sets, but upon closer inspection we'll find it to be not that hard to navigate, especially when we simply close the Sets we don't use. For a walk I'll close Hands and Face. for close up shot I'll close Legs and Hands etc.
Let's look at all the possibilities.

What's more, we can create a hierarchy, sort of Quick Select Set of Quick Select Sets.
Collapse all the new QSSets, select them, go to Create/Sets/Quick Select Set. Give it a name like: "Set1_Old_Man" and look at the Outliner.

Instead of all the QSSets you'll see only one. Open it and there they are.

Below is my usual set up  for blocking.

The last interesting tool is autoTangent. Looks like Maya2012 has it (finally!), but I'm not sure if it's
the same tool. If not, and if your versions of Maya are older, you can download the tool here. Then you can either make a button, or simply drag and drop it into the camera view, then in MEL just type autoTangent and hit Enter.

Now we're ready to start. Take a look at the post "Walk Cycle"