Learning Maya & First Animations

Over the past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time learning the Maya software package. Having used 3ds Max before and knowing that I prefer modelling to animation, I felt that this would be the best thing to learn in Maya in order to get comfortable with it. I used the Digital Tutors Introduction to Modelling in Maya to partially model a swiss army knife. Because in this segment of the course we're focusing on animation I didn't feel the need to finish the tutorial, just get myself aquainted with the feel of the software before attempting animation.

Once I felt comfortable in the software and had made enough basic, trivial mistakes to try some animation. In a tutorial in university we were instructed on how to make a bouncing ball. Thanks to previous experience in 3ds Max, I didn't find the animation concepts too difficult to grasp. I am, however, entirely new to the graph editor. Once I had gotten the hang of the logic involved in using this new tool, I found animation to be a generally simpler and more enjoyable experience.

I am pretty happy with the results of the bouncing ball excercise. After seeing other people's final results I have noticed that I have gone for a much more "cartoony", exagerrated style. My squash and stretch is fairly extreme. I don't necesarily feel that this brings the animation down though. What I do feel brings it down is the sudden and extreme squash when the ball hits the ground. I feel like the amount of squash is right, but the lack of transition between the two extreme states annoys me a touch. I have tried playing with the curves in the few frames I have when the ball is in contact with the floor but I can't get it to look right, even when I add more key frames. I feel like, If I had more frames to work with, I might get a better result.

The next excercise in animation was a walk cycle using a ready made rig, sweetly named, Moom. Needless to say, this excercise was much more difficult than the previous one and required much more patience and skill. Luckily, in anticipation of the animation unit, I bought a copy of Richard William's The Animator's Survival Kit. The book contains pictures of what a walk should look like frame by frame, as well as extremly useful information as to why the illustrations work. For instance, one extremly useful piece of information was that when the front foot makes full contact on the floor and all of the weight is shifted to that foot, the bend in the knee needs to be greatly exaggerated. For some reason, when the knee is bent to a realistic level, which is only slightly, the animation looks like it isn't carrying any weight and just looks like it's "floating". With this information, I managed to get the feet moving in a convincing way. I believe that a lot of the best learning come from working something out for yourself and making mistakes. It was with this thought that I decided to work out the arms for myself. My first attempt at the arms had them simply swaying back and forth. This looked extremly unrealistic and gave no sense of inertia. When adding a bit of overlap running through the arm and down to the fingers the effect was much more convincing, even if the walk now looks a little too overly casual.

The only realy frustrating problem with the walk is that, at one specific point in the animation loop, the left leg shudders. I have inspected the curves and gone over the frames in that area slowly to try and catch the problem, but unless the animation is playing the problem doesn't visibly exist. I will have to consult a tutor on the problem. In the meantime, I am going to attempt to add the run cycle onto the walk.