 |
| Autodesk Maya Logo |
This week was all about getting acquainted with Maya, its interface and the basic controls of the software. As someone who has a background in visual effects and compositing, I had some basic knowledge of modelling from college a few years ago going into this so the learning curve wasn't as steep as it could've been.
After relearning the controls a few times - the camera movement took a little getting used to - it was time to try and build something. We started off with a basic block castle using just the primitive shapes and the controls to move the shapes around. Now, while my castle won't win any prizes for creativity - I managed, with lots of trial and error, to do what was asked of me and in the process, reinforce my knowledge of the interface and the controls.
From here, we moved onto something a little more complicated and that was using extrusions to add additional faces to our shapes with the hope of making some game assets - a simple treasure chest and a mechanical gear. After being walked through the process a few times because the controls for the extrusion technique weren't quite clicking in my head, I felt comfortable enough to give it a go myself and set about making something resembling a chest and gear.
By the end of class I had managed to make the assets required and was really happy with the results, however, just after class ended as I was preparing to save my work Maya crashed and I had lost what I had been working on all morning. It was also in this moment that I discovered that Maya does not save by default like I'm used to with other programs I use so as I prepared to redo everything all over again a few days later, the first thing I did, was turn on autosave to prevent me losing so much work, again.
With class now over and disaster, basically confirmed, our task for the following week was to complete the chest and gear to get more comfortable with the controls and if possible, add in some sort of animation on the chest and then, make one additional prop if you have the time.
I took a day away from Maya so as not to overwhelm myself but in that time I had been working on some drawings of what I wanted to try and build for the tasks we were given. It was time to get to work.
