Today, I got all the Soft and Rigid Bodies finished. This was a great start to how physics work, It was super cool to see the randomness of how objects function when given physics. Seeing all the possible combinations is super surreal for me! I didn’t have any problems with this assignment, which is good, and I’m excited to figure out what we are doing next!

Today I made a fully functional Wrecking Ball in Maya. It started off pretty bad, as the chain kept breaking, but turns out that was an issue I couldn’t fix, so I was given another model of the ball and chain and did the animation from there. Luckily, everything else went smoothly, and I was able to get it done in one day! Even though it was short, it was still really cool, and I loved seeing the wrecking ball shoot all the blocks away in one hard swing!

Yesterday I started working on the Rigid and Soft Bodies Assignment. So far, this is my favorite project yet, since we get to work with physics! I love playing around with physics stuff, and this is no exception! Even when I got home, I decided to load up Maya and mess around with it even more, it was fun. So far I haven’t had any problems, so that’s going well.

Today I was finally able to finish my Crane Assignment! I’m really happy how it turned out, especially the movements in how fluid they are and how they work. The thing I’m the most disappointed about is the weird stretch that happened in the middle of the Crane. That wasn’t happening before, and quite literally appeared out of thin air. Even weirder, it’s appeared on all of my Crane Project saves, even the ones that did not have this problem the last time they were saved. I’m super bummed that happened, but I’m still very proud on how the base thing turned out. The things I enjoyed the most in this assignment was the animations themselves. Getting the animation to sync up perfectly to the box being picked up just looks so amazing, and I’m really happy with the outcome!

Today I almost completely finished my Crane Project. The only things I have left to do are Playblasting it and writing the final blog! I’ve had a lot of fun with this project so far, and I haven’t had too many issues except for that one time. Being able to see something I made in motion is pretty cool, and I’m happy with the results.

Today we started a new project called the Crane Project! In this assignment, we learn how to rig and weight paint a Crane to have it pick up and move a box. So far, I’m doing well, and I’m very excited as Rigging and Weight Painting is the thing I’ve been looking forward to the most. I have had troubles however, as I messed up a few layering things, and since we are using a tutorial from 2018, some things are outdated/broken. Luckily, those things were fixed right before class ended, so that’s great.

This assignment for making emotions was pretty short, but it was still fun! Making a proper mini animation is fun to do, and the outcome almost always looks good, and this one follows with that pattern just perfectly! The most problematic thing that occurred during this assignment, is that I had to remake the model due to Blendshaping it before I was supposed to, which I in turn saved and couldn’t revert, so that sucked. While this was annoying, I’m actually happy that I had to do this. Doing this allowed me to remake the model with prior knowledge of what to do, so I was able to make it look better than it did originally. I think my favorite part about this assignment is seeing the facial movements themselves, as it’s just fascinating seeing something you made just come to life with emotion and expressions.

Today I worked on Blendshapes in Maya. In this tutorial, I first modeled a simple “face” and then animated it. What I did, is was I started it on a sad face, then a scowl, then finally a happy face. So for, it doesn’t seem too difficult, but still fun. The only problem that I had was modelling the face in the first place, because I’m bad at modelling, so it wasn’t the easiest. Either way, I liked the tutorial, and I think I’m going to like our upcoming assignment using it.

Today, I finished working on my Bendy Objects assignment. The assignment had 5 videos to it, all of which I watched and was able to make this simple animation out of. This was a fun, as I was able to learn about many basic, simple, yet very useful pieces of Animation. The only thing that has been annoying is things that are now outdated in Maya from the release of this video. Lots of changes have happened and now some of the stuff that happens is different from how they used to work (which is annoying, especially for a tutorial of all things.) The info I have learned from this is how to use the 6 different non-linear deformers, and what they do. Luckily for me, they aren’t complicated to figure out, and I was able to learn pretty quickly.

Today, we worked more on Deformers. What we learned was different ways to use them AND how to use Lattices. Lattices create a little area that can deform objects inside of it, which works super well when it comes to Animations. The only problem I had today was with them being deleted even though they shouldn’t have been deleted yet. What’s supposed to happen is that they can remove their history and then be able to be moved out of the Lattice still with it’s effects. This, unfortunately, did not work, and we had to use other methods to get it to work, which wasn’t too annoying to deal with, if not it made it easier. I really like how this works so far, and I hope it gets better in the future when we get on to other parts of Animation.