Day 4

More video's and more work to be done.

I have finished my talented ball project. After looking at what other people have done I feel a little down that I didn't put more work into it. I had so many good ideas but my lack of knowledge of how to move them around prevented me from doing more cool stuff. I learnt a lot from this project and I am hoping that it will pass. I did have some problems with some frames not doing what I asked them to do but I found a work around.

The main things I picked up here was how to use the animation graph editor, how to set keys, set driven keys (which I love) expression (again very cool) and a lot of cool hints and tips with rendering and shading.

My note book is looking a bit messy so now I am reorganising it so I can understand the important points later.

I have now started on Section 3 - the Maya Architecture - Theory. In the first lesson the crew looked into the two types of graphs. The Directed Acydic Graph (DAG) and the Depency Graph (DG). These are all about nodes and which nodes you find in each graph. The second lesson was about Network Dataflow. It discussed how nodes send data to each other and how important it is to notice which way the data is flowing.

These current videos are all theory. I am building nothing here but in saying that I find it very important to understand what happens when I do things within Maya.

The assignment for this current project seems very hard as I have seen no one pass it yet. I think I have seen 5 people fail. I hope I will understand it enough to get a pass the first time but I won't be upset if I don't as the feedback you get back from Buzz and Zak is A+.

The feedback is all in video form for everyone. They give you a two minute run down on what you did well and what you can improve next time. The best thing is you can see other peoples feedback so you can learn from their mistakes. In the colour wheel assignmnet we can not see the feedback though.

All in all, it is going good. I am keeping up with my peers and still have good energy left to keep going hard.

until tomorrow goodnight.

Day 3

As I have no videos to watch and I was very tired, I past out at 7:30pm. So I did nothing today. I am planning on doing more tonight (Wednesday).

Day 2

Finished all of the project 1 video's. Since it is past 12am it is now Tuesday.

I have learnt a lot so far and it has only just began. I am glad I have done all of the project as I need a few early nights so when the next bunch of videos arrive I will be fresh. I also think I better spend some time with my girlfriend.

I am now going to make the Talented Ball a little longer doing a few things that I have learnt. So far I have used expressions to control the bend and next will make the ball go a little crazy.

Tuesday nights plan:
- storyboard remaining animation.
- start putting remaining animation together.

Please leave comments and tell me where you are up to.

If you are not taking the course but are thinking about it, beg, borrow or steal the money to do this course as it will raise your skills faster than you can say "insert something witty here".

Day1

Wow, doesn't time fly. I have just about completed the animation section of project 1. All I have to do now is create an automation rig for my little guy. once that is done I will be off to ad some colour to my talented ball.

Buzz and Zak have held my hand through all of this. Some parts I have gone through very quickly because before the course I was trying to learn as much about Maya as I could. I have found that wasn't needed because these guys are going through everything very slowly. Since I know some things at times it is too slow but I am not complaining.

Unlike many other tutorials that Buzz.om has done, they are not always working on the current scene. Often they step away to explain a concept in detail before applying that idea into the scene. Because of this approach I have learnt a boat load and my little note book is looking very messy. I am glad I have the videos so I can go back over many things here another day. If the course didn't have so many hours of video to watch I would be taking my time more with each topic but I am pushing myself to complete everything under the time limit (5 weeks).

I am really enjoying the course right now and the Buzz crew has done a good job.