Maya Fundamentals Progress Log

Project 3 render

2005-12-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

Here's a render from Project 3, When Mechs Attack. Someday I'll figure out how to upload the whole clip.

My post office horror story!

2005-07-15T14:52:00.000-04:00

One of the major events that have happened to me recently is I finally got my DVDs from 3DBuzz. I am happy to be able to finish my project 2 render and continue on with project 3. But, first, I thought I'd share this story of how the mail system screwed up. Disclaimer: None of this is the fault of 3DBuzz, it was Canada Post and Purolator's fault completely!
My DVDs were sent to me a couple of weeks ago, I think it was June 28. They got up to Canada by July 4, and sailed through customs with no problems. It took only 7 minutes to clear customs, surely a record.
Then Canada Post got their dirty little hands on it. Their computer insisted that the address was incorrect. So what did they do? They passed it on to Purolator. "Let them deal with it", they said.
So, Purolator got the package, and they said "Hmmm, it says that the address is incorrect." and gave it to their driver. The driver got to my condo building and said "Hmmm, there is no buzzer code on this package. I guess I can't deliver it. I'm too lazy to use the "Buzzcode Lookup System" in the lobby". So he took it back to Purolator, having failed to deliver it.
Then, Purolator put it aside, and said, "we'll wait 5 business days, and if it doesn't magically get picked up, then we will send it back to Canada Post". So a week went by, a long, long week, where I was hoping and wishing for a package to come. My 3DBuzz C++/OpenGL VTMs arrived during this time! "Hurrah", I said, "Surely the Maya class DVDs must be close behind!" The next day, nothing arrived. So, asked Angela for the tracking code, and looked up the status. To my horror it said "Address correction required - returning item to sender" and had a date of that very day!
So, I called Canada Post (as at that time I had no idea Purolator was involved), and they said, "If that package is being delivered by Purolator, you'll have to call them. Otherwise, there is nothing we can do. We will not be able to correct the address". So, I called Purolator.
Purolator said, "It says the address is incorrect, and there's no buzz code on it, but we can't correct it for you. Sorry, there is nothing we can do. We've tried to deliver it and it was not possible. It's going back to Canada Post for delivery back to the States." I said, "But I can give you the correct address or the buzzcode, whatever you need!"
They said "Sorry, call Canada Post. There's nothing we can do."
I said "But nobody has left a message saying they tried to deliver anything! Usually they leave packages with the security guard in the lobby!"
They said "We don't do that, sir, due to security reasons. You must be home at the time the package arrives. Call Canada Post, it's their problem now."
I said "But I've already called them, and they said to call you!"
"Call Canada Post." they said, like a mantra.
I said "I want to speak to your manager". This was the single best thing I could have done. The Purolator girl who had answered said "Fine!" and put me on hold for a good 5 minutes.
The person who came on after, said "May I help you?". I explained the whole situation and asked them if I could just give them the buzzer code and confirm the address, and they said "No problem, we'll schedule delivery for tomorrow morning. Thank you for using Purolator!".
So then the package finally arrived at 8:45am the next morning. They left it with the security guard.

Oh well, back to the class. Render, render, render, damn you project 2!!!!

2005-07-15T14:19:00.000-04:00

Project 2, The Abduction. Shot 2, frame 254
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Project 2 underway

2005-06-07T10:45:00.000-04:00

I've started on project 2 now. It's going to be a cool 30 second short film. I think I might use iMovie and GarageBand to do some titles, music and sound effects for this one, I've got some ideas for what sound effects I'd like in it. It depends on how much lag time there will be between what I am working on now and the time the rest of the videos arrive in the mail.
This modelling project is a little more advanced than the first one. Now we are modelling in Nurbs, doing lofting, revolving and bi-rail operation to produce the spaceship. I'm finished modelling the ship, now I am going to start on the alien tonight.
I had a few challenges getting the spaceship model done. First, when I initially made the hull segment of the ship, the planar operation to cap the ends did not work. I think it was due to not all the CVs lining up properly. I ended up just starting over again and it worked the second try. Next, when I was lofting the inner ship shape, when I selected the 3 middle curves and deleted them, my shape changed from the lofted shape to a thin cylinder. To fix this, I had to explicitly delete the history of the surface, then I was able to delete the circles. I tried this again on a blank scene, and I did not have to delete history first, so I'm not sure what I did that caused this in my space ship model. I accidentally deselected the shape before I deleted the circles, I must have done something at that time to cause the problem. At least there was a workaround.
Finally, I found the iris door in the bottom of the ship to be the hardest thing to get right. My first attempt seemed to work, until I got to the end when I duplicated the final shape to make the door. It did not look right at all, it was bunching up too much when the door opened. I deleted it and started again. My second attempt went wrong when I accidentally rotated the hulls in the wrong axis and didn't notice it. I ended up with not a flat surface at the end but a shape that bulged upwards, and that did not look right at the end either. I find it is easy to rotate things the wrong way by grabbing the wrong rotate manipulator in the top view. Gotta be careful. The third attempt, I was having trouble when duplicating the flat door "blade" to give it thickness. For some reason, after I lofted the thickness in and scaled it down, I must not have had everything selected properly, there was one part of the blade that just refused to scale in at all. I must have tried to get it right about a dozen times. I ended up just starting over again to make sure I didn't do something wrong in an earlier step. The fourth try, I finally got it to work and look just as Buzz demonstrated in the video. Hurray! The ship is done. Here are some nontextured renders.

Alien Ship model

2005-06-07T10:44:00.001-04:00

Alien Ship

View of Iris door

2005-06-07T10:44:00.000-04:00

View of Iris door

Maya Architecture

2005-06-07T10:27:00.000-04:00

I've finished watching the architecture videos, which are great. They give an understanding of how Maya really works "under the hood". You can really do a lot of things with Maya's node-based architecture, it's pretty amazing stuff. I don't think any other 3D application even comes close to this. I tried to complete the color wheel assignment, but haven't made much progress so far. Once I'm caught up with the project 2 videos, I will revisit the Color Wheel assignment.

Friday morning

2005-06-03T11:21:00.000-04:00

Well, I've finished the talented ball project, and submitted my animation to Buzznet. Buzznet is great. You do your assignment, submit the zip file to Buzznet, and they give video reviews of it whether you passed or failed or if they want to challenge you to do something more.
They also have a chatroom in there, and a daily audio message (on some days) from the instructors, Buzz and Zak. You can also post audio questions and get audio answers from them. It all seems to work great.
Hopefully in the future they'd consider porting it to Mac OSX. My version of Maya is on OSX and I'm using that to do the class. Luckily I have a Windows laptop so I can do the Buzznet portion of the course to submit my assignments. But I'm sure there are people who only have a Mac who'd want to do these courses.
I'm now in the middle of the Architecture videos where they go deep down into Maya, and they show us how Maya's DAG and DG work. It's pretty interesting stuff, and I find the more I know about how Maya really works, the more comfortable I am with the application as a whole.

The Talented Ball Stage - Modelling in Project 1

2005-05-29T16:31:00.000-04:00

The Talented Ball Stage

The above image is a quick render of my current progress in the Maya Fundamentals course. I've watched all the introductory videos, and the modelling videos for the first project, The Talented Ball. The course has been very quick and effective in getting me up to speed on modelling with primitives. It's hard to see everything right now, as there is no shading yet, that's after the animation part, which I am just starting now. The coolest part of the stage set has been the curtains, and getting them to open and close using parenting with some simple controls behind the top of the curtains. I never knew it could be so easy.
Buzz and Zak, the brains behind 3dBuzz and the instructors for this course, somehow have a talent for teaching complex material and making it seem easy. This is a rare thing to come across. So far, this course has covered subjects that no other beginner's book or video for Maya does. Already, they've gone over just about every element of the Maya user interface, many of which were a complete mystery to me before, having only read the introductory tutorials that come with Maya and the Maya Beginner's bundle DVDs, which did not cover all the UI elements and how they are used.

First Impressions

2005-05-27T13:49:00.000-04:00

Now that I've finished downloading the first part of the course, I can give my early impressions. The course starts with an overview of Maya's User Interface, then covers viewports in depth, then moves right on to the first project: The Talented Ball.
Now, I have not viewed most of the videos yet, I've been listening to the UI overview videos at work, since I have previous familiarity with the UI from the Maya Beginner's Bundle DVDs. Already, though, the UI overview covers quite a bit more of the user interface than the beginner's bundle does, and I will definitely be watching these again at home either tonight or tomorrow morning. It's just not the same listening to it as if it's a radio show. I definitely need to watch them to see what Buzz is doing as he describes it.
The project is more than your typical first bouncing ball animation. It looks to cover a lot of features, like modelling, quite a few animation features like Set Driven Key, Reactive Animation, Dynamics, deformers, soft bodies, and control rigs. It also covers shading, lighting, and rendering. Pretty much everything you need to produce a short film in Maya.
Once I actually watch these videos, I'll update you with more information. Already I can see just this first part of the course puts Alias's Maya Beginner's bundle to shame.

It has begun...

2005-05-27T06:28:00.000-04:00

The first part of the course videos are now available for download, so I'm downloading them as I write this. They are half a Gig!
The adventure begins....later.

Pre-course jitters

2005-05-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my blog, which is going to track my progress in the Maya Fundamentals online class, offered by http://www.3dbuzz.com . This course is the ultimate intro to Maya course, taught by Buzz and Zak of 3Dbuzz.com. It's going to be a 5-week course, with 60-70 hours of video instruction, and assignments to complete, with feedback from the instructors. If this course can't teach me to do cool things in Maya, nothing can. The course begins May 30, but they said they may be released the first 20-25% of the course sooner.

I will be using an educational version of Maya Complete 6.5 on Mac OSX for this course, on an eMac 1.25 GHz, which I have just upgraded to 1 GB of RAM. Maya seems to perform quite well on this machine.

I have been working a bit with Maya prior to this course, but just a little. I bought the Maya 6 Beginner's Bundle from Alias and have viewed that, and I have also had a little exposure to MEL scripting through 3dbuzz.com's Maya TD course that they have on their site. I am also working through the Alias Maya 6: Foundation book, although I just started that this morning.

I will post still pictures as I work on the assignments from my works in progress, although that may be a week or so, since I suspect there will be tons of video for me to watch before I get to the first project.

Stay tuned.