Practical Research Project - Day 5

As you may have noticed, I quickly abandoned my plans to make a daily record of my progress after I spent the better part of Tuesday thinking and writing about what I'd done on Monday.

From there, having realised that I needed to return to the basics, I went over rigging a character for animation using Maya's own "getting started" tutorial. (http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/Maya2012_Getting_Started/index.html) I'd already gone through the modelling, texturing and animating parts of the tutorial, and I find that they're a good introduction to the program, although they really do only cover the basics. Unfortunately they're not enough to let you successfully create, rig and animate your own model, as I found with some interesting results...

After much perseverence, I managed to get something that looked a bit like a bear trying to jump, so I went with that, and ended up with this:

 

Shocking animation and terrible compositing, I know. I found animating in Maya frustrating, because I got a much poorer result than I would have done in 2D, despite spending a lot more time on the work. Setting up the model for animation was particularly time-consuming, and even then it didn't deform the way I wanted it to, and was difficult and unrewarding to animate.

I do intend to continue trying to learn 3D software for animation, but I've realised that I severely underestimated the steepness of the learning curve. Although the basics can be picked up relatively easily, making anything which actually animates well and looks good is much harder. While looking for uselful resources, I came across Digital Tutors (http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?cid=5) which offers some free video tutorials, and then the rest on subscribtion only. I didn't use any of the tutorials, but they seem to have a lot which go into depth on rigging and animating in Maya.