Maya so far

Okay so over the last couple of weeks, I have been introduced to one of the top leading 3D softwares in industry, Autodesk Maya. Learning how to use this program comes hand in hand with my animation brief in which I am to produce a 2 minute animation using a simple looking toy, preferably a child's toy because of the basic geometric shapes.

These pictures will also serve as a source of reference and will be added to the front and side views on the Maya workspace.

At first, the program seemed so complicated and I got easily frustrated but I'm more or less getting the hang of it now. Here's some screens and short animations showing what I've been doing/learning.

This model of a truck is the finished product of a tutorial I followed in order to get use to the tools and my around the basics of the program. After learning the basic layout and tools, this was the first task given to me and I struggled a lot with this. There were some functions like the snapping function that I found really hard to understand even now so this is definitely an area in which I need to practice.

These two images (above) just show a bit of experimenting I did with the deformer tools which are Cine, Twist, Wave, Bend, Flare and Squash. In the bottom screenshot I used a combination of to different types of deformers to see what shapes I could create.

These three screens shots again show some experimentation but this time, for the hypershade tool and with this, I applied some basic colour to my objects. As you can see, I had a play around with the luminosity, transparency, light intensity among other things.