The first 3D workshop has come and gone.  We had a full house of eight people.  We ran out of time when it came to the Animation half of the workshop.  After I descried a typical 3D pipeline, spent a solid hour just on Maya’s interface, most of the time was spent on modeling (where I continued on mentioning even more elements of the user interface).  Animation was squeezed into the last 40 minutes.

Here’s a brief breakdown of how things went:

User Interface (UI)

This took more time than I originally scheduled for. Unfortunately, it’s one of the more difficult aspects of Maya for new-comers.  If I explain it in too short a time, I’m afraid people will have a hard time accomplishing the modeling and animation goals of the workshop.

Modeling

We covered polygonal modeling using a box-modeling style of a head.  Of that, I only covered using the “Inputs” section of the Channel Box (Also known as the object’s “Construction History”) to change an object after it has already been created in the scene.  Then I moved on to talk about  extruding faces out from the original surface of a polygon object, splitting some of the polygons into smaller polygons, and added entire “Edge Loops” of detail around the entire shape.

Animation

Animation suffered from a huge lack of time.  I covered the keyframing of a bouncing ball.  At the same time we used the “Graph Editor” to edit the curves that detailed the inbetweening of the animation.

The Dinner Break

Because we were so strapped for time, some people stepped out for dinner and brought food back and ate as I continued the workshop.  There wasn’t any one-on-one attention unfortunately, but I tried to move at a speed that most everyone could follow along to, and, for the most part, I think everyone did well.

For Next Time

I hope to make some minor changes to the lesson plan to better fit the material into the time frame better so the next workshop runs much smoother.  For the next workshop on the 31st of this month, I plan to start promptly at 4:00pm and hand out a printed version of the 3D pipeline description. I will also add a brief outline of the workshop to the “3D Training” page of this blog.  People can download it and have it as a guide during and even after the workshop’s over. I also have a short-cut card people can download and print out for reference that I will also put up on that same page.
So that’s it for now, but I want to thank everyone who came. I look forward to doing it again at the end of the month. See you there!