Day 60

Here's a video of some text flying around. The video goes crazy at the end but you get the gist. Next I went back to the catapult I made awhile ago and animated it. Now I'm done with another chapter. That seemed to go by pretty quick. Next up is another chapter on animation though.

Day 59

I'm back to my book and to start out I have to make a bouncing ball again. This ball deforms and rotates as it bounces so it's a little bit more realistic. Then after that I made this ax get thrown.

Day 58

This next lesson was quite a bit more complex. Another case of me understanding what was going on but probably unable to replicate on my own. The main idea was creating a skeleton with joints to control this mechanical arm. So instead of animating each part, I can just move around the end and the rest of the arm will move accordingly. But they also threw in a bunch of new ideas and tips and that's where it gets overwhelming.There were more lessons on making skeletons and moving characters around but I'm going back to the book to reinforce the basics.

Day 55

Now I'm moving onto the next area of Maya which is animation. I decided to continue with Maya's online lessons instead of going back to my book because these lessons give a good foundation and seem to have some very useful information that the book doesn't always mention. The videos here aren't the best quality. I learned how to make quick preview videos that don't look that great so hopefully I'll learn how to output some better ones. I could probably look it up quickly but I'm lazy. The above video is very basic stuff. I place the ball at different places over time and the program fills in the rest. Then some tweaks are needed to make the bouncing look better.

This video shows how one object's animation can depend on another. Instead of animating both objects individually, I have the door's height depend on the balls position. Now when I move the ball to the right, the door automatically moves up.

And lastly, I have a plane traveling along a track at different speeds and banking around the turn.  

Day 54

A really detailed model usually has a lot of polygons. It looks nice but it's tough on computers to process. This lesson shows another use of textures and mapping. Here the detailed model on the left is used to create a map that tells the program how light should bounce off its surface. This map is then placed onto the low resolution model in the middle and you end up with something like you see on the right. It has the same small amount of polygons but with this extra layer of information, it looks a lot better while being easy for the computer to handle. This lesson was more about showing me what was possible since most of it is over my head at the moment.

Day 53

Now a soldier guy is a lot more complex than a cracker box and you can see how jumbled up the map on the right is. The trick is to learn how to unravel the mess so you can easily place the 2-D image (or create a 2-D image) and have it go where you want it to go. First off, I separated the soldier into different parts (arms, legs, head, etc). The arm was easy. You can imagine taking a sleeve, cutting along its length and then laying it flat. That won't work too well with a head though. So you can understand how there are multiple ways of unfolding these shapes and learning how to use the right one is important.

So the lesson taught me different ways of unfolding. Once I have the different maps, I can export them and use them as guides to create textures in programs like Photoshop. But here they provided me with textures so it was easy to apply onto the model.

Day 52

I continue to tread familiar ground with these online lessons. I'm onto applying textures onto models again. This is a very simple introduction involving a box of crackers. I take the three dimensional shape, unfold it to create sort of a map, and then I'm able to place a two dimensional image onto the map which then gets placed onto the model exactly where I want it to go. Now with a box, it's pretty straightforward. Things get a little more tricky in the next lesson.