JOURNAL 2: WEE YOU

Wow! Unknowingly, we have reached the end of the Maya. For this semester at least. There's still 3DVA nex year!

I had fun! I learnt a lot of stuffs about maya, from modelling, to rigging, to animating, to rendering! Modelling is a very fun thing to. It was very interesting to see the end results of the endless extruding and adjusting of vertexes. For eg, during the city, we were trying to model our buildings according to buildings found in the real world.

We also modelled cute stuffs such as the LEGOMAN and the FLOURSACK! Not only that, we put life into them by animating them. For example, we rigged the FLOURSACK and gave it IK handles, making it move realistically. This injects life into the FLOURSACK, as we can set a lot of real-life poses, such as a sad floursack, a whining floursack, etc.

Animating the legoman was also loads of fun. It is very interesting to see how you made your legoman move, and how cute it becomes. We also applied funny textures to the legoman, such as giving it hair, and letting it be "half-naked". This was done mostly using the UV Texture Editor. IMO, that is a really powerful tool that allows a texture to be projected on a non-plane surface. For example, by adjusting the UVs, it is possible to add a "sky texture" to half of the skydome. making it look realistic.

Another interesting thing I learnt was the rendering of the scenes. When I did the scene, I felt that my quality of work is really bad, probably due to the textures i applied. However, when I rendered it fully with lights applied, it looks magically beautiful. This is where special effects can be seen - the generated shadows, differences between blint and lambert, etc. etc. etc.

Rendering the scene took a long time though. Most of us lost sleep because of it, as we thought it would be as fast as "playblasting". Also, after we rendered, we realised how ugly and screwed the playblast was.

EDIT: OMG I forgot to mention about squash and stretch! It was such a fun deformer to use. It exaggerated our ball movement, making it look reaaally reaaaally nice.

Other than the Maya techniques I learnt, the assignment 2 was a precious precious memory etched in my heart forever. We fought through tiredness and sleepiness in order to complete our 3d masterpiece. Everybody was really tired, and was spamming coffee to stay awake. After we finished our work, we celebrated by singing and dancing crazily. This is because of the awesome sense of satisfaction we get from completing our work.

I'm sure I missed out a lot of points which I wanted to say, but in short, IN3D has been a very fun subject, and I learnt tons of things about Maya and 3D concepts. BYEBYE MAYA! For now..