Maya 2018 Animation Fundamentals
This course for the most part was a refresher course on concepts we had already covered in class. I did enjoy learning about the time editor and how useful it is for looping animation cycles, blending animations, and exporting animation clips. I especially liked the idea of using the blend animation clips to create a baseline to work from and refine for transitions as opposed to recreating everything from scratch. The last segment about MASH was particularly interesting due to how versatile and how many different effects can be created with its use. I wish the lesson had gone into a little more detail about the MASH feature, but it is definitely something I can find a more robust tutorial for later on.
Maya 2019 Fundamentals : Rigging and Animation
In this tutorial I enjoyed learning about rigging basics and how to use IK handles and controls to rig a complex vehicle. Especially parenting the IK control of the joints of a pipe/cable to the root joint so that when the main component is moved, the cable follows in a more realistic manor. When it came to creating the control curves, I learned that grouping the curve will help maintain the zero’d out values wile still being able to move the curve. Along those same lines, instead of rotating the object and risk rotating the pivot orientation, it is much easier to rotate the control vertices so that the pivot orientation remains zero’d out as well.
Ashley Johnson 