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. 

Applied Animation: Maya Animating

I very much enjoyed doing the Maya animation tasks, it's a very easy thing to get used to with the interface being incredibly intuitive.

I found the graph editor so useful and also very easy to pick up because it uses the exact same principle as graph easing in Animate, Premiere, After Effects and many others.

I really like how each polygon object has it's own path. Especially when doing the segmented pendulum, it was so useful to break up with movements and even edit them from the graph editor. I can see so many great uses for this and I can see it making refining movements so simple and effective.

Obviously, I also animated the TARDIS and spacestation, the TARDIS was a bit more complex because I was trying to get weight in it's landing but I found this exciting to try.

I did have some trouble when I came to exporting these final playblast videos. Whenever I did it, it would just export as a blank green screen. I was really confused by this but it turned out that this was something to do with the default player it was opening in as when I opened the video file from its saved location, it was working just fine.

I think that I actually enjoyed modelling in Maya a bit more than animating. Maybe because it was more of a new feeling that the animating as that feels very familiar and comfortable. I did really enjoy animating though as it was great to see these elements come to life and it's so easy to do not having to redraw anything if you want a different angle or movement. I am very excited to further explore 3D modelling and animation in Maya.