Before our classes officially start up again next week Alec made us a helpful tutorial introducing us to Maya and 3D concepts through creating a cute cactus model. This was a fun refresher of fundamentals as I have a fair amount of modelling experience using Maya, however not so much with rigging and animating. While I have done a tiny bit of rigging, skin weights and animation before in 3D, it hasn’t been very frequent and often had mixed results. I learned a lot in this area and also learned something completely new with using MASH networks and Placer nodes, this is something I wish I knew earlier, seeing as it makes duplicating identical geometry around a mesh much easier than manually placing it. It was also good to learn more about using materials and rendering in Maya, something which I haven’t really explored beyond just simply applying them occasionally to differentiate between parts of a model.
Didn’t want to go too crazy with the design or texturing in Substance in case I had issues later on so kept it fairly simple and followed the tutorial to save any headache. Maya crashed a whole lot so for this first animation attempt I forgot to set the framerate back to 30, so this one is at 24 fps.
Cowboy Hat + Moustache Version
I wanted to make the cactus more interesting so I went back and modelled some more details like a hat and moustache and re-animated the character. Thankfully, figuring out the skin weights for the new additions wasn’t too complicated and it was pretty straightforward. I made sure to set the fps to 30 this time.
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