- Modeling lesson - “Adding a door to the dungeon”

On Saturday, we had another full house. All eight seats were taken and the night was packed with “3D goodness”. This time I wasn’t surprised when the final hour rolled around and we hadn’t started talking about animation yet. Having learned from the first workshop back at the beginning of May, I decided to split up the topics a little so that we weren’t just talking about the UI most of the night, but instead coming back to it again and again as we delved into the other topics, modeling and animation.

There were some people we got stuck here and there and that was to be expected. Expecting to understand everything in just under four hours, even the basics, is a tall order. So if any of you that were there are reading this now, go easy on yourselves, you did well, considering. Still, I believe that the original goal of the workshop was met, that is, I wanted to introduce Maya to people who have never really sat done and tried to make something with it. And to those that have attempted to make sense of it, the workshops were meant to help them break through to the next level where they became truly capable of solving there own problems.

Having a tool whereby you can bring to reality (at least on screen) anything your imagination can conceive is truly a gift to behold.

The workshops being, far from perfect, I will still continue on to the final installment in two weeks time and strive to hone the lesson plan even further with the hopes that they can deliver on its promises.

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!

I posted the signup sheet this morning in the PiP breakroom and response was extremely good.  I think there is over a dozen names on the list now.  I will leave it up for the rest of this week just in case people haven’t seen it yet.  I will take the email addresses that people have provided and send out a newsletter of sorts detailing my intentions for the workshop, along with a propossed  date and time.  I am meeting with Dulcie tomorrow morning to discuss using PiP’s animation floor as a location to give the workshop from.  There are plenty of computers and they should be more than powerful enough to run Maya for what we will need it to do.  I am very hopeful that we’ll get access to the studio and have a great experience.