Applied Animation: Maya Modelling

This is something I have been really excited for because it's something quite new to me. I have played with 3D before but never in Maya and never with such complexity.

Despite the tutorial, I actually didn't start with making the truck, I just went straight onto the 'Do it yourself' task. This wasn't really done intentionally, I just found myself making the TARDIS after loading up the program and playing around with some of the tools. I really loved playing with a new program like this and feel I picked it up pretty quickly and am excited to explore it further and learn more.

The colouring was a part that I found a bit challenging. I couldn't get the colours to apply properly. I think I made it more complex for myself than it needed to be since I was also trying to add a wood texture along with the blue. I eventually worked it out by just continuing to try many methods and options and just experimenting with it. I didn't manage to get the texture working but this is something I will try to do in future.

If I were doing this again, I would be able to make it much neater. I experienced some issues with the edge loop tool not detecting the mesh all the way around. I had made a lot of the initial indents using new cubes, whereas if I were doing this again I'd just make extrusions to keep the mesh tidier and easier to manage.

Although the brief didn't ask for it, I really felt like I had to animate this. I had made a 3D model of the TARDIS... it just needed animating. I played around with trying to group all the different polygon elements I'd made and animating them all together. This however still made everything rotate around their own anchor points so I instead combined the mesh into one object and animated that. I used the graph editor to get a natural feel to the TARDIS landing and give it some weight to which I'm really happy with the result. This animation can be found in the 'Animation Skills' folder.

I then came to making the truck, this didn't take very long since I had already made the TARDIS and the spacestation models and was really starting to get the hang of it. The only issue I encountered was when the program just crashed when I tried to bevel an edge, so I had to start again, but it still didn't take very long.

I was having trouble lighting and rendering in both of these tasks, but for different reasons. The TARDIS rendered properly once I was shown what to do with lights and render settings and I could do it myself again and again on many different angles. Doing this also worked first time when making my spacestation. The truck however simply wasn't working with lights. I went about it in exactly the same way as my other 2 models but everytime I created a light, it was just a blank object with no lighting attributes. I tried copying the truck into a new document and the same issue occurred. I tried copying lights from the TARDIS file as I knew that they had worked fine, but when moved to this document they stopped working and wouldn't actually light anything. This was incredibly frustrating. 

The issue turned out to be something to do with my computer at home as it worked first time when adding lights in uni. I will have to look into this in future to try correct this issue so that I can add lights on my own computer.

I have really enjoyed getting started in Maya. I feel that I've learnt quite quickly. I'm happy with what I've created and am excited to see where I can continue to take it in future. I feel like the way I am most likely to use it is to create backgrounds as reference for 2D animation so I want to get some practice in over summer.