3D: Technical Learning

Learning to use Maya was a struggle for me and I still don't think I have a very good grasp of how to model and animate within it as I prefer a 2D approach, I feel that this is way more suited to my strengths and how I think about and analyse movement.

Modelling in Maya is frustrating for me because it is a really slow process, I have no idea how my character is going to look for hours or if a little mistake like extruding a point in the wrong direction will effect my final rendered piece while I'm making it.

I much prefer being able to sketch a quick outline and then add more detail with strokes rather than molding shapes. It was the same case with building a stop motion armature but I prefer that over using Maya to create things to animate because armatures for stop motion are tangible and I can hold them in my hands which helps me to figure out what needs to be changed, unlike modelling in Maya.

I had some help when starting off my model, which was a helpful push in the right direction and showed me that modelling is an entirely different process from drawing, having to think about more complex shapes that could be extruded and molded from a basic square or shape using points and buttons was really out of my comfort zone.

In progress shots of modelling the body from a rectangle to have the shape and weight that I wanted to convey within my character.

Over all though, I think I did my best with my character here. Perhaps if I was more interested in investigating 3D further I would polish it off a bit more but for now, it is enough of an achievement for me that I got this far with it despite the errors, blockiness and general unfinished feeling it gives off.

 360 degree spin of my character uploaded to youtube.

Animating in Maya, while I thought it would be easier and more enjoyable than modelling, having tried both now I can say that I would much rather model in Maya than animate. I found it impossible to get my head around even the simplest of motions with the pre-rigged character, I could have achieved the movement I wanted in less than half the time on paper with pencil.

I am thinking that this is due to how I think about movement when I animate. My hand would instantly go to sketch out the basic shape of a movement to go over in more detail in 2D whereas with 3D I am having to manipulate a rig which I don't understand and it feels very tedious for me to do.

In theory I should be able to apply the same thought process with 3D by blocking out basic movements and then going back to add more detail but everything seems to get too messy too quickly for me to keep on top of.

A play blast taken from my progression reel is above, as you can see, I am having a lot of trouble with even basic movement and this is after trying for hours and hours to get the finished piece done and out of the way as it is quickly driving me to insanity.

I decided that in the end, I was fighting a loosing battle and have decided to submit the best three seconds of 3D animation I had, shown above. I had a lot of trouble with the rig, for example when trying to make my character wobble, I found that something was wrong with it's knees and so when I went to refine the jump into a landing wobble, the knees would move into a kind of frog like pose and no matter what I did, I couldn't fix it. This was on my fourth attempt of starting my animation from scratch.