I dived more into Maya this afternoon. I learned quite a bit and I loved the walk through a lot. It made Maya seem less stressful and complicated to me. I can say I definitely understand it better this time around than I did in college. I wrote down all the hot keys for doing this but, I will give you the cliff notes version of what I learned.
Today I learned about camera control. I learned about what the space bar does within Maya and how it will toggle the camera settings. I learned about view ports and how to make those active. I learned about how to open the hyper graph. I learned how to move, control, and navigate cameras. This part of the lesson was helpful especially. I didn't realize that there was a difference of moving the camera and the button combo that allows you to pan a camera. I learned about the keys in which you move the camera, the select camera button, the pan camera button, the zoom in and out feature, and how to scroll in and out fixed in settings. I learned how to make an object come into view. I learned about how if you hit certain keys that it will frame everything to make it helpful to navigate our world in Maya. I learned that the camera moves in the middle of our objects. You can press a key and frame a selection. When you do this, the camera will center its orbit around the object itself. I learned how to zoom into a specific region of an object or area and how to move out and in easily. This was super helpful. I definitely have a better understanding of the way I was moving in Maya and how in college it was easily able to mess up a scene with a single click if I wasn't careful.
The next video that I watched was about creating Projects. This video helped me learn how to set up Maya's directory paths to load scenes and data properly. Maya has its own way of doing things in a very particular way. I learned about setting up a project and to make sure I save in the appropriate directory. I learned about Maya's directory structure. I learned about creating a project and the folders I should be especially concerned with when creating and working on projects. I learned about checking on the project to make sure it was created properly. This one I remembered somewhat from college. It has definitely been about almost 5 years about since I have used Maya.
The next video that I learned was the more lengthy video. I took a lot of notes in this section. I learned about Nodes & Transformations - Primitive Objects. I learned these are a great way to start building an object. I first learned about the 4 Primitive Objects: NURBS primitives, Polygon Primitives, Volume Primitives, and Subdivision Surface that is located in the Polygon Primitive section.
I then when into detail learning about each of the primitive objects. I learned how to break off the menu and use it at my fingertips on the screen. I learned that NURBS stands for : Non Uniform Rational B Splines. These are primitive objects that are made up of curves. The surface of a NURB is an approximation of what it actually looks like. I learned about the properties of NURBS. I learned about what interactive creation is. If you turn this on..then it allows you to build your own custom NURBS of your own height, width, etc. It is a handy feature but, it does add values to our object. It can mess up te scale values as well. The next part that I learned about was Polygon Primitives. I learned that these are the most used because they are flexible, versatile, and they have the largest amount of tools to manipulate them. Polygons definitely has a lot more geometry and edges compared to the NURBS. Unlike the NURBS, the Polygon's vertices actually sit on the surface. NURBS are approximation where as, Polygons are not.
I then learned about Volume Primitives. The volumes are very different. These are not used a lot. I learned that they allow us to extract information from it and use it for something else. For example: You take a volume and then assign a certain type of material to assign to the volume. Volumes are used to create something that is not so tangible such as fog, smoke, etc. With volumes, you cannot go and change its shape but you can however use transformation tools. There may come a time where you will need them depending on what you are working on.
I learned about the 4th Primitive that does not show up on its own. If you go to Polygon primitive, you have the ability to create a subdivision surface. A subdivision surface is a hybrid of both polygons and NURBS. You can get there by hitting the 3 key and go to the vertex and the vertex is actually sitting out not as far but an approximation. It allows us to exploit the benefits. Nurbs have very smooth surfaces. Polygons can be difficult to get a smooth surface. The reason it is hard to get a smooth surface is because we have finite control of every single point. It stays very smooth when bending vertices. You can toggle between the polygon and subdivision. If you click on it and it will go back to that polygon surface and go back to 3 it will go back to the smoothness of a Nurb.
In conclusion, I hope that I can continue to learn and work my way through the Maya interface so that I can continue to work and expand my animation knowledge. I want to be a well rounded concept artist and animator who knows how to work in 3D software as well and possibly Zbrush soon too. The next set of tutorials that I have are: Transforming objects, Parenting and Grouping, and the Hypergraph, and Outliner. I have many more after that still but, that is what is ahead of me.
