Maya Tutorial: Eyes

    The tutorial on the eyes were a fair bit simpler and easier to grasp than previous tutorials, however this could be because I am getting more familiar with rigging.

    My only concern is that when it comes to creating the blink and eyelid movement mechanics I can either have one or the other and not both, although this may be solved by looking a little deeper in the driver editor as whatever I put into the driver editor overrides what I set up in the connection editor and vice versa.

    If I cannot find a loophole, at least the mechanics for opening and closing the eyes are still there. So when it comes to making characters blink it'll just mean collectively changing these settings rather than using a single parameter. Having the mechanics for having the eyelids separately working is better than only having the mechanics for blinking.

Maya Tutorials: Rigging Arms

    I have been meaning to catch up on Maya tutorials as I fell slightly behind but, I am glad I have this part done as I imagine animating legs will be somewhat important in my animation even if it is only for a brief moment, but the small touches can go a long way to turning something good into something brilliant.

Maya Tutorials: Can Exchange And Nonlinear Deformers

    Today we worked on some more animation. The first half of the lesson was dedicated to the use of locators in order to transfer objects between other objects, with each locator acting like a magnet - one one inside the can, one inside the can but static and two connected to the palms of the two hands. Once I got into their use I felt fairly comfortable using them.

    The other half of the session was spent understanding the use of deformers in animation. With these animation classes I have been wondering about which of these animation principles I will find myself using for the Fantastic Voyage project, in particular the use of the wave deformer in case I go with the idea of having malaria parasites passing though the barrier of cell membranes.

Maya tutorials: Rigging the Right Leg and Spine

Today's Maya session went somewhat smoothly, although it did involve needing my memory refreshed a couple of times on certain stages of construction covered in the last rigging tutorial. Construction of the spine was a little easier and the way it is linked up gives me the suspicion that the generic man and woman that I used to create a pre-viz missed this component out as I recall when trying to move their waists all I ended up doing was twisting that single node and not pivoting the entire torso as shown in the GIFs above.

I included menu tabs for future reference, with parenting especially I used the relevant hotkeys to activate the tool.

Maya Tutorials: Camera Rig

    The day seemed to come relatively quickly, as today was the tutorial of how to set up a camera rig. There were some rough patches as it was one of those lessons that involved familiarising myself with the locations of unfamiliar toolboxes in Maya but by the secong half I believe I had grasped the use of the required tools such as the connections editor.

    Still, this is a tutorial that I could probably consider with refershing myself with at some point to solidify my understanding.