Ethan D. HND

Over the year we have worked on many projects in the program Maya. It has been both a rewarding and difficult experience.

I have learned many skills in relation to the software. Such as creating polygon shapes,texturing a crate,beveling and connecting shapes together to make other shapes or objects. This was then put into practice when we built a 3D post-apocalyptic environment in Maya.

After the modelling project we moved on to learning how to animate in Maya,this was started by learning to make a bouncing ball. I learned how to set key frames,edit the speed and flow of the animation in the graph editor,how to 'playblast' an animation - Making a low/average quality video of an animation, and how to batch render an animation into a high quality image sequence.

The next Maya animation project I completed was to animate a flour sack. I was given a pre-made flour sack rig and instructed to either make the sack do a jump sequence or to make an animation of the sack being emotional. I opted for making the sack jump. It was fun yet challenging to work with a rig,it took a while to get the hang of moving each separate limb the right way to make a nice animation. I also learned a good lesson on keeping good file management in this project as the textures for the sack will not load correctly if the correct location folder is not chosen prior to opening.

The last project I completed was the expressions project. We were given a rig of a cartoon man and instructed to make the rig blink,and if we had time,make a facial expression such as a smile. I found this particularly difficult to work the cameras when I had to switch machines but animating the rig itself was fairly straightforward.

Things I believe I could improve on would be file management,posing tools within animation and the graph editor. The graph editor is very tough as there is a lot of colored lines and its hard to figure out which lines edit some things so it is mostly trial and error. I feel if I practice more over the summer I will get better.

Overall I am happy with the skills I have learned in Maya this year and I am eager to apply the skills I have learned to my studies next year.