Evening all,

I am just trying to get my head around animation layers in Maya. I have a character animated but when I make an anim layer above the base animation all the keys from the character come into the the layer, which obviously I don’t want.  Clearly I am doing something wrong but I don’t know what it is.

Any advice gratefully received

I will preface this response by saying that the MAYA help has a really solid breakdown of animation layers.
Which is not the case for some topics.

What is happening with your base animation layer and adding new layers is a little disconcerting.
If you want to keep your keys on the Base Animation layer, I have found that you can create an empty layer and then add the objects you want to that layer...instead of creating a layer of selected objects.
But since the Base Animation layer doesn’t give you as much control as all of the other layers you may create,
I would recommend working completely on other layers...you can duplicate the Base Animation layer and start working from there.

Not sure if this helps...let me know.
~Ben