Finagle the Bagel

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 the crest, 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. :)