10/21/2020: Study today and the last few days have been heavily focused on learning materials, lighting, and animation within Maya. These are all enormous and critical features that – while very interesting – are secondary to my main goal of getting a lot better with the geometry. Here’s some notes on those three topics.
For UV mapping and materials, the most useful piece of information has been that for components that are definitely going to be used repeatedly throughout the mesh, UV mapping them and then duplicating them saves time in the long run. The example in the Intro to Maya 2019 tutorial was making the bolts holding a deck chair together. By UVing the first bolt, and then duplicating it out repeatedly, all instances of the bolt would have the same UV coordinates. You could spend an entire career getting deeper into Maya’s materials, which are incredibly powerful for rendering. Considering my short term goal is to really improve 3d modeling for importing into video game engines, it’s going to be useful to be able to get nice previews of normal maps and bump maps but they’re not critical.
Animation is definitely VERY exciting. Maya works with a timeline where objects’ transform (move, rotate, or scale) between different fixed keyframes. Maya lets you control the normals of the vectors between these points on the timeline (so you can have a stairstep immediate transition or a smooth curve or a direct line or shape it yourself). The most exciting feature here was that you can define multiple layers of animation that all apply to the object. These different layers can also be weighted and that weight itself can be changed overtime. The example in the tutorial was excellent – it was the animating of a weathervane turning in the wind. The bulk motion of the weathervane was handled in one layer of animations – swinging as the direction of the wind changes. A second layer of animation was defined for the weathervane shivering in the wind. The two were immediately and seamlessly overlaid so that even as the weathervane swung with the change in wind, it still oscillated a few fractions of a degree regularly with the wind blowing around it. That’s an incredibly powerful animation system and makes me think of thrust vectoring planes on spaceship engines as a possible application.
My hope for the next mini project is a robot character, an armored suit for a humanoid figure. That’s a hell of a lot further afield and more ambitious than the basic Taiidani fighter I was working on earlier this month, so we’ll see how it goes.