Mitchell Whitney - Maya Progression

 This week we finally began to model a humanoid character to get a feel for what will be required for the assignments. I was able to successfully model the boys body, minus the head, and have a go at creating the hands, which I personally think went quite well, but definitely need some work. The use of the mirroring effect is also very helpful when it come to modelling symmetrically. This week I intend on getting all characteristic of my own design down on paper so that I may be able to start sketching some rough designs within the next weeks. 

This week we played around with some of the other tools present within Maya. We went over a little more with the extrude tool and some of the other properties and settings that can be altered to give different result. We also touched briefly on the use of the Create Polygon tool and how it works to create a free form shape. Lastly we touch on merging two objects together. Personally, having used other 3D modelling applications before, the process of merging to objects was quite convoluted  and not very intuitive at all. The requirements of having to essential delete the history of each object to complete the merge, while it was interesting to see how Maya handled things like that, it was slightly annoying. I have yet to put pen to paper for my design of my character, however I have thought more about its overall design. I will be going for the initial idea of a smaller sized character and having him carry tools that are basically small utensils, such as the toothpick I mentioned ea...

This week was the real beginning to doing some basic modelling within Maya. Previously I've used both Blender and Houdini, so the general use of Maya seems to be quite easy to follow for me, it's largely just familiarizing myself with new commands and the UI. This week we generally just went over some basic transform tools to begin with but then into using extrude and the multi-cut tools. Using these tools we created just a basic "dead tree" model. it was quite easy as I have had experience before using these tools in other 3D modelling software. As for the character design that will be used later on in the course, I have the general idea of a small male character that is in the size style of something along the lines of Thumbelina or Arrietty , where the size of the character appears to be small in comparison to the tools or items he is carrying, like a toothpick as a sword. Still quite early yet to finalize anything.