Maya Roundup #2

This week I attempted both of the tasks set for the other 3D group, this was a weight shift and a stretch. The weight shift I found pretty straight forward, looking at myself doing it in a mirror and just thinking about my stance to figure it out and, although its simple, I'm pleased with the result.



The bigger task was the stretch, I found this a lot more challenging, because this was slightly longer I worked by the key poses blocking workflow. I found this helped to me to get nice poses, however I had a lot of difficulty with the timing and getting between the poses nicely.
In the end i figured this could have been due to the poses just not being natural enough for a stretch (I didn't do any referencing for this piece)
I got it looking fairly nice in the end by playing with timing more on some of the poses and limb movement.
The rendering for the scene was pretty basic, I knew I wanted to have the shadow of the window falling onto the character in bed and I managed to achieve this. Modeling simple objects like the rooms and the bed is definitely helping me get used to more of tools Maya has.

I still need more practice using textures, until this point I have been using materials and shaders, which I think is a good skill to know however I feel my UV unwrapping knowledge is still fairly lacking.
I also attempted my own scene with the Mery rig, my aim was just to get a bit of practice using the rig and try to use the face rig a little more. I think it turned out quite nicely in the end, but I know there is still a lot of room for improvement. This was also rendered with a very simple environment that I made.



Also this week I have started working on the 3rd year short film 'headless' doing character animation which I think will teach me a lot, I'm very much looking forward to seeing the film completed, and I'm very happy to be a part of it.

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