Maya!

After many delays, a class finally got filled up this Fall semester for Animation I. Which is really just learning Maya, since we're not learning principles of animation or anything theory of the ilk that you would find in a Stanchfield or Frank & Ollie book.

I am actually surprised to see that Maya is really not that hard of a program (so far). Once you get some hotkeys down, learn what some buttons do, how to navigate, it is very manageable. We started the class following those video tutorials that pops out when you first load Maya. We then moved on to constructing a temple following the first project Maya 2008 comes with which can be found here (If you have maya 2008 open, just hit F1 and it should open up on your default browser):

http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2008help/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

My results are below:



The thing in the middle is just some object our teacher made up when he was showing us how to extrude objects, manipulate points using their vertex, scaling, translating, and other basic functions.

This last assignment was to research a temple and build it. I went with my favorite Greek goddess: The Temple of Athena Nike

We have started working out of AutoDesk's Foundation book right now which is pretty cool since you get to model and animate things from Sony's "Surf's up".

That's about it for now, bummed out there won't be any rigging or animation until next semester, but...it does make sense.