Maya 2

My second session at Maya, again working on the bouncing ball but this time into more detail on the actual principles and approaches to rigging and control the animation’s fluid movement .  First we looked on how to construct a squash effect to the ball without it moving from its pivot point.  At this point I am still getting my head around the controls and what does what.  Maya is still like no other programme I have used before, I thought I would be able to at least compare it to Photoshop but the overall setup and principles are not the same.  Within the first part of the lecture we looked into parenting and how to constrain two objects together.  A few times I had to ask James go over a few things as I’d just missed out what was said or some things just weren’t sinking in.  Most of the time, I just had trouble finding where certain windows were such as the set driver.  But finally I was able to complete the first session of the ball to squash and stretch.  I could see how the rigging of the ball to make the ball squash and stretch is referred to Disney’s principles; therefore my 2D skills still apply while animating on Maya, you just have to approach it a differnet way.

We then looked at the swinging arm, we were able to download a model of a basic arm from the mle that already had the pivot points and constrained points set for us.  Using our knowledge from the bouncing ball, we had to animate the arm swinging from side to side, using the graph editor to create a flowing loop of the waving arm.  I am still not used to the graph and the way to set key frames, as Maya inbetweens everything for you and it is all calculating the number or frames where as last year most of my animation was not key framed so it is something I simply need to overcome.  I am still a little lost with learning new aspects of Maya but am indeed finding it very interesting and now and mind blown how all the full length feature films are done considering I am still having trouble just bouncing a ball.  I am determined to continue attending the lectures and hope that I would have understood it enough to at least make a small sequence to put in my show reel.