Blog Progress Update Week 2

This is the blog progress update for the week of January 21st 2013. This week i covered another tutorial on digital tutors which covered the basics of Maya Rigging (Link). The tutorials this week were in my opinion more interesting and useful than the ones last week mainly due to the fact i have less overall experience with Maya rigging. This tutorial opened by discussing what is rigging and the different forms of rigging from parenting, joints, IK handles up to control objects. I am currently more familiar with joints and parenting right now, and i'm hoping to learn a bit more about IK handles and especially control objects as that seems to be the industry standard as far as rigging goes.

 I myself hadn't really considered parenting to be a type of rigging more like a simple way to deal with keeping an object together, but after looking back at it I suppose it could technically be considered a form of rigging. I also found much like the last tutorial that these videos are of really great quality i just wish there was some more free ones for use or a better student deal for paying for a subscription.

Overall i found these tutorials good for the basics i was just hoping it covered Control objects a bit more but i suppose that it is a bit more of a advanced topic so it doesn't particularly suprise me that it wasn't in this introductory level video.

Blog Progress Update Week 1

This is a blog progress update for the week of January 14th, 2013. In the first week of my exploration into Maya animation i decided to a tutorial provided by Digital Tutors with their tutorial Beginners Guide to Maya Animation. This tutorial wasn't particularly difficult in anyway as it really just went over the basics of Maya animation including what is animation, what are key-frames and how do they work as well as deformers which i must admit is something I can't really recall studying before so it looks like they may be worth looking into more.

After the tutorials went over the basics it began to go into setting key-frames and working with the graph editor and going in depth over deformers in order to animate a lawnmower. The tutorials themselves were of great quality and I would highly recommend them to someone just getting started but i personally can't afford the vast majority of their lessons as normally the site requires a paid subscription.

Overall it wasn't a bad lesson but perhaps a tad below my level, as i already have a fairly solid handle on how animation works within Maya. I may rethink next weeks lesson which is supposed to be the beginners guide to Rigging by them, but I do need some rather extensive practice with that so i will likely stick with it.