Maya

Working in 3D
I am using Maya a 3D animation program I have never used any 3D programs so this is a first for me and I will have to learn the program from scratch. Our brief is to animate a domino affect, one event causing a chain reaction. I have decided to animate a book case as I’m not confident with using Maya and don’t want to give myself too much to do and not finish.

Reference images






















Here are a few screen shots of my work so far.










Story board




I was happy with the animation movement and my modelling, though I did have difficulty at the beginning but after I was shown the basic commands I was able to create everything I needed to complete this stage.
I did a few problems with the software, for example after animating a few frames when I played it back objects would fly around the scene erratically with no obvious reason. This meant I had to delete large sequences and start animating over, as this was quicker and easier than finding and correcting the problem.
Another problem I had, again caused by my lack of knowledge of the program, was that I started animating with the wrong settings so when it was played in real time it played in slow moating and I only had 5 seconds of footage, To make matters worse this was 3 days before my assessment so I had to add more animation and sort out the timing for the first section of animation so it played in real time.
The biggest problem I had was rendering. Every time I tried rendering at university the computers would take ridiculous amounts of time to render a few frames and ended up crashing before it had finished, so I tried doing this at home on my own computer, I was able to render my images but when I tried to move them onto my USB they would loose their encryption. After getting my images rendered I then had the problem of turning still images into a movie format, This was a problem as I didn't have any programs that could stitch the pictures together into a film so I tried to do it in lectures but again I had problems with the computers crashing, This meant my animation is not fully rendered as I don't have access to a computer that can do this.
I wanted to put audio to my animation but again I didn't have the means to edit the audio I had recorded or the ability to import the audio.

If I were to do this project again now I would choose to do something a bit more complex as I would have a better knowledge of Maya and would be more confidant to try modelling more complex objects and texturing them. I feel that I could produce a much better piece of work if I had a couple more weeks to do this project.