You can use assets to replace the existing police car in the scene with the fire truck model you created in Lesson 1, without losing the existing animation.

First you need to make sure that the published attributes of the police car and fire truck match precisely. To do this, you can reuse the template you created in Lesson 1 from the fire truck to define the police car.

To assign a template to an asset

1. Select Assets > Asset Editor.

   The Asset Editor appears.

2. In the left column of the Asset Editor, select police_car_AST.
3. Click the Pin Asset icon ().
   

   The police car currently has no published attributes, so the right panel remains empty even when the asset is pinned.

4. Select Template > Assign > Assign New Template > .

   The Assign Template Options window appears.

5. Turn off Autobind and Create Stand-in Attributes.
6. Click Assign Template.

   A file browser appears.

7. Navigate to the emergency_vehicle.template file you created in Lesson 1 and select it.

   If you didn’t start at Lesson 1, navigate to GettingStartedMaya2012LessonData\Assets\assets\templates and select the file emergency_vehicle.template.

8. Click Assign.
   

   The published names defined by the template appear in the right panel. However, right now they are unbound to anything in the police car asset because it had no matching published attribute names.

   Note

   If the attributes don’t appear as shown, you may need to press the refresh button ().