In this class i learned animation skills involving the software called Maya. The class, in theory was quite straightforward, as most of the time we followed tutorials written in a book. I found this class quite fun, although there would be times when i would stay up all night to finish work and would feel terrible the next day. Advantages of Maya is that it is a very malleable software, you can make anything if you have the patience and knowledge to do so. It allows different types of modeling such as polygons, Nurbs and a third one which i cant remember. Basically polygons creates the simple forms of the shape, which are easier to work with, then you can convert the polygons to Nurbs which smooth-ens out the shapes making the shape appear more organic.
A common problem for beginners using Maya s that they tend to use too many polygons in heir shape therefore it slows down the processing speed of the computer as it has to deal with the shapes complexity. It should be common practice to use the least as possible, which i did not do which caused my final piece to crash.
Rendering is a skill that needs its own manual in Maya as it is etremely hard to get different images to mesh perfectly with each other, i found myself tweeking every single plane so that could make it look half decent. I do think with more knowledge on this it would have been alot easier to work out how to render as i think i was doing it the long way.
A particualr problem in this class was that it was a lower level beginner class, so in order to differentiate from harder classes i beleive the tutor (Mr Godwin) tended to hold back information that would have proved useful. Its not a bad thing although students willing to hit the floor running would gain frustration at not being able to perfect their designs with higher level techniques, but as the saying goes, “All in good time.”
My work in particular was lost so these are the works of a fellow classmate Gary Jones who let me use his works as examples (Nice one Joey) i do not claim that these works are mine i am just showing them as example of what my work would have looked like.
train by Gary Jones. following instructions from a book to create a 3D train. During this tutorial i learn how to batch duplicate and manipulate the shapes in a faster and effective way.
By Gary Jones. Tutorial on meshes and Nurbs. Meshes would make it easier to manipulate largers surface of shapes with greatly distorting it. Turning vertices in numbers helps edit shapes from the least detailed being ‘1’ into the more detailed ‘3’ alowing you to perfect the shape more clearly than having lots of different vertices to mess with (vertices are the points that can be manipulated, the more points, the more detail, but the harder it is to control).
Hampton palace by Gary Jones. Final part of the project was to use everything we had learned and to put it into practice using our own imagination and reference to achieve this. This was fun although mine had way too many polygons and would not alow me to animate a camera through it, which was the very last project to complete.
In this class i achieved an ‘A’ grade which i was proud of.
Just want to say thanks to Gary Jones for being a good friend while i was in the states and allowing me to use his works as examples.
