The Art of Maya

Maya is a very complex package that is used widely in the animation industry, it has many features to model 3D characters, objects, scenes and many more capabilities. Personally I like this package and am hoping to learn the package in the future because of its uses and how it is know for producing the most popular animated 3D movies e.g. Toy story, enjoyed by everybody around the world. It is said that 3D Computer Graphics is a form of communication, especially animation which is also considered to be an art its self created over the last century. The introduction of 3D computer graphics over the last couple of decades has had a big impact large on the world of animation, Maya is ver complex to use, I have found using the package over the past few days, challenging due to my inexperience with the package, I have had no experience with the Maya previously and have been recently using it for a small brief given to us revolved around 3D animation, I have gradually getting used to first stages of creating a character in my with the modelling tools but I feel that I still need to learn the effects the tools create e.g. face tool and edge tool, tend to mix the two tools and end up creating edges instead of faces and face instead of edges.

Learning Maya is complicated especially when we were given the task to model a fully rigged character I had no understanding of the controls and I had no idea of how to model which mean't I failed a few times to create a basic pelvis for character which was the begging point. I was provided with my tutorials to get used to the basics of modelling and this helped me understand the tools and their functions a lot more because it directed me to the tools and made me understand the layout of the programme. Now I feel  like the programme makes  more sense and that some of the functions that I have used are simple to understand after experiencing the package in use. I stated before in order for me to improve with Maya is to investigate and experience its use through someone else understanding e.g. Magazines, video tutorials, books because these will help me build my knowledge and progress me further with understanding Maya.

From reading The Art of Maya, I now understand that Maya is not just use to animate of model but can be used to create; Games, Visual, Effects,Visual pieces for the web, Broadcasts and can be used to animate scenes in films. There are no limitation to what can be done with Maya, it is not designed for just animation.