Maya Lesson 1

Today I got to use Maya for the first time, and just when I thought I go the hang of it, everything went wrong! I was able to follow the tutorial sheet and complete all the commands, however when it came to adding colour and rendering, I was completely lost.

We started off by making separate shapes in order to make a truck. Then once we got the hang of this we could manipulate them but changing the vertexes and bevelling the edges to make them round/curved. After a few tries, I found this easy enough to pick up, it was just being overwhelmed with so many options that struck me at first.

After adding a few shapes my truck started to really come together! Though there were no textures at this point, I was really pleased that you could distinguish what object I was making! I also found out I could duplicate several objects so that I wouldn't have to keep making them and eyeing them to the correct size. This was especially helpful with the wheels. Now at this point, I started to add colour and texture. I did this by right clicking an area of my object and choosing the option "add existing material". Through this I was able to choose from the colour palette and also a multitude of textures. 

However when I went to render, there were absolutely no colour showing... whatsoever! This was extremely frustrating for me because everyone else was able to render and save and after all the hard work, I couldn't get mine to show up in colour. After asking for some help, I was told to try it at another point, maybe something was off, so instead I went home, downloaded the software and remade the whole thing from scratch.

I ended up with being able to add colour... AND being able to render. What I think happened was that I had clicked something by mistake, and I wouldn't have known how to solve this because there are about a hundred different options in this massive software, so I decided to just start over. HOWEVER, once I had rendered and seen that i didn't really like the position of the camera or it's angle, I went back out of rendering to re-position, and the program crashed... and I lost everything.

So after a third or fourth time of having to do this task I saved after every step and ended up being able to render with colour AND save. This was my final result. I have learned lots about this software. It's not that it is exceptionally hard, I think I had case after case of a bit of bad luck, however after repeating these steps I do feel a bit more familiar with the software and know how to work my way through it!