Week Eleven

MONDAY 03/09/07:- Today has been spent playing around on Maya, creating environments and figuring out the dynamics of an environment(Gravity Etc); as we await our Maya industry briefs.

TUESDAY 04/09/07:- We received our industry briefs late yesterday afternoon. I've been given the Calon brief. Using the Maya program I have to build and design a character, then animate a 'memorable' entrance to a scene using lighting and movement. It sounds simple but it ain't. This will probably be the most challenging brief I will have to do as it's the first project I've done using a 3D program. There will be blood, sweat and tears in this project!

WEDNESDAY 05/09/07:- Yesterday I sketched out a few rough ideas for a character, and began modelling him/her in Maya. Today has been spent finishing the modeling process including colouring in the character. The character is of a simple design so hopefully he/she will be easy to animate. The day has also been spent adding the skeleton to the model, Ive done this a few times today. I've had problems moving the skeleton with the 'IK handle' tool. The 'IK' tool allows you to manipulate the movement of a limb from one point, this cuts out the need to move each individual joint to create a movement. However as I've discovered its not that easy, you must make sure that the orientation of each ball joint is correct, otherwise your limbs will twist around at an unnatural angle. Maya is frustrating at the moment but I think at the end of the brief everyone will be pretty savvy on it.
This morning Andrew Offiler the 'Head Honcho' at Calon paid a visit to CYFLE. He took me and Kei through the brief and gave us an outline of what we can do for the 'Reveal Scene'. We watched some DVDs that he had brought, looking at the reveal scenes of characters e.g. 'Dumbo' and his ears. It was useful. It gave us an idea of what makes a character introduction scene work.

THURSDAY 06/09/07:- The plan for the day is to finish rigging the character. Hopefully by the end of the day I will have completed attaching the skeleton to the body, and prepared it for some test animations tomorrow.

FRIDAY 07/09/07:- I'm very happy today I finished rigging my character, all the bones are in, all the control points are in for the limbs, body, head and eyes. I've got a CG puppet that can be manipulated into any pose. Two weeks ago I knew nothing about Maya. The first week on Maya was intense. INFORMATION OVERLOAD. However this second week has been a real learning curve. Through trail and error I've managed to create a working CG puppet. Hoorah!