Last Maya assignment. We are given this character that someone else modelled and rigged. The task is to make him jump twice. It can be any sort of jump. My friends said that my characters always move in a happy way.

The previous onion boy walked as if he had a spring in his step. This one did a happy hop.

Most of my classmates are more ambitious/faster or have more time. My friend searched parkour out on the net and did two jump across two walls and miss on the second wall, climbs over and falls down on the other side. My animation is smoother than hers but it’s way simpler. Another is going to animate a very complicated series of jumps from ground upwards into a winding staircase. I need to learn to be faster damn it. Everything I do is so damn slow. I can’t let go once I find my animation too jumpy. I keep spending time adding more keyframes and adjusting to make it smoother or I just can’t move on to expand the scope.

3rd animation assignment was to do a walk cycle. Animate the character given (onion boy) to walk a minimum of 4 steps. Again, some of my classmates did a more cartoony walk. I did a normal one but I also know that this one is a bit too robotic. The legs look ok to me but the body is still too stiff even though I already made the hip sway a little and the top of the head bounce a little.

Because this blog is dying and I have nothing to post…

I still have not gotten any of my 24 drawings I did in the first three months. I’ve just finished my Maya animation course. A total of 4 animations. I’ll just post 3. The second one is boring. Here’s the first of the series of assignments.

We’re supposed to learn how to use Maya basically and make one heavy ball, one rubber ball roll together and react. The rubber ball must stretch and squash. The timing of both balls and their rotations must be believable.

Some of my classmates did a more exaggerated bounce since it’s animation afterall. I just chose to do one that feels realistic.

This is one work I hate a lot. Halfway modeling this damn car, I found so many problems that I gave up on making it look nice. I just modeled until it looks like a car at least.

I couldn’t do a proper Insert Edge Loop for the longest time then realized that Maya was recognizing my polygons in a weird way. Some horizontal lines that were obviously continuously cut across the body, Maya didn’t recognise those and went towards other lines instead.

Had I realized this and fix it earlier, I would have saved 60% of my work hours because of all the fixing I had to do each time I use Insert Edge Loop. This is when I gave up on the car. Dateline is approaching and was feeling stupid for all the frustration that could have been solved easily.

I didn’t know when to combine object, when not to. I followed my friend and started combining parts of the car I modelled into one whole body one object except door. Which was a big mistake. Now there’s no resemblance of the car being put together with multiple parts. It’s just one big shell (minus door). So there goes all the effort to model the car part by part out. Yes I could have extract it all out again but it’s already past the point where I gave up.

Also, this is the assignment that made me gave up on going into Modeling specialization. I have decided to go into Visual Effects for sure while doing this car.

Hurray! i’m a complete noob at Maya. I have a reputation in class (and the lecturer knows it) for ruining my own UI. Making things disappear or doing strange stuff that makes things not run smoothly. Things that take people 5 mins to do smoothly takes me 2 hours because I need to troubleshoot. Yes! Troubleshoot for just simple small insignificant things. Almost every step I take is a challenge and a big hurdle which definitely is not normal.

Either way, I managed to cut down funny stuff from happening to me by half and this is what I came up with for my assignment.

Obviously not very impressive. The task is to make a set. It can be a room in the house, or anything. Most people made rooms as suggested by the lecturer. I chose to make the living room. It looks simple but a lot of dumb details were blurred out due to distance. Such as the speakers…

Can’t really see from the overall shot. Makes me feel like an idiot for making details that can hardly be seen. Still it was fun. At first Maya was to be my most hated subject. Now I’m actually enjoying it. I can’t imagine learning it by myself. I’d have died from frustration for all the strange mistakes I make that no other noob beginner in class make.