I'm not sure what to blog about this week; the assignments were pretty straightforward, and I had a lot of fun doing them!
I love studying line of action poses on my own, so being able to create them with the morpheus rig was very enjoyable.
Creating the obstacle course for the ball to barrel through was intimidating at first thought, but as I started to get deeper and deeper into the assignment I found out that it wasn't that hard (although my animation is still pretty elementary), and it was fun to make my own little arena!
Aannnddd.... that's about all I have to report relevant to assignments.
On a more interesting note, has anyone seen the cartoon Motorcity? Basically everything about it is awesome, especially the character design and the animation.
Titmouse, the animation company, apparently uses Adobe Flash for the work, but they have a special rig that makes the 2D animation look and handle like 3D animation! It's crazy how far 2D animation has come in the last few decades.
Thinking of blog post titles is hard. I suppose I could stick to a formula, but where's the fun in that?
This week for the third assignment - two balls of different weights - I had a lot of trouble; as someone who can barely even walk downstairs while talking at the same time, multitasking has never been my strong suit. Working one object realistically into its environment was hard enough, but having two objects that needed to believably interact with the environment and each other? That threw me into a bit of a tizzy.
I managed to bust out a product where the balls fly across the screen while narrowly escaping physical contact with one another, but I can't say it's my best work thus far. I tried to attempt a scenario where they bounced off one another (rather, the "golf ball" bounced off the "bowling ball"), but the thinking involved with that rustled my jimmies way past the point of tolerable frustration, so I stopped and opted for something a little more my speed.
Hopefully I'll be able to think more complexly in upcoming assignments, but for now.....
After working on the assignments for this week, I feel like I'm finally starting to get the gist of Maya! Although the most I can do at this point is make a ball haphazardly bounce around a prearranged box, I think that I've come pretty far from knowing absolutely zero.
It's funny, because at first when I was doing assignment 1 (ball bounce w/o squash and stretch), I was manually making keyframes at thecrest, trough, and midpoints of every bounce the ball made. All in all my midweek took me 5-6 hours of fiddling and failure. I thought that there must be an easier way to work, so I looked up any reference video I could find until I came upon the graph editor.
Then, like a brick to the face, I had an epiphany that I only had to make keyframes at the ball-to-ground contact points, and that the graph editor would make my life a million times easier. It was the greatest feeling in the world to finally know what I was doing instead of floundering around like a fish on deck!
Thanks to the graph editor, Assignment 1 ended up taking me about 5 more hours to perfect for pass 2, adding up to a grand total of 10-11 hours of work.
Even better, I discovered hot keys this week, thus clipping off half of the work I would have had to do physically switching from the move tool, to the camera zoom tool, to the rotate tool, to the camera rotate tool, etc, etc, etc.
I know I haven't unlocked the super cool chamber of secrets I know is within Maya, these two little things ended up helping me a lot for Assignment 2.
Assignment 2 ended up taking me a grand total of 7-8 hours of work. Speaking from experience in creating digital art, 3 hours isn't a huge difference in work time. But for a beginner like me, it's progress! And I love progress.
And because solid text posts are super boring, a cool video to spice stuff up:
I've estimated that with my current capabilities, creating an animation like that would take at least 4,050 years. Because of this, I've resigned myself to simply appreciating it. :)
