After receiving our first brief of the year, I did not know where to begin with ideas for our first project, therefore I was more than happy to have a Maya refresher lesson to ease into the pre production process! I feel completely out of my depth when it comes to Maya because it's not something familiar to me and is completely foreign, so I knew from the start that this brief would be a great challenge for me, though I am excited to see what I can achieve.
We started off by using a pre made model by Matt that was already rigged so we could establish the main joints and alignments that are important for posing a character. With a few demonstrations it became clear that for the most part, the hips, knees and elbows are probably the key joints that you need to make your character seem realistic, therefore these were the points that I targeted.
I had a lot of fun experimenting and giving my character 'life'. I felt like with a few poses you could easily establish a personality for something so basic and inanimate.
Once I finished my first pose, I had a little more of an experiment in trying to make my character pose mid-action. I was also very happy with this one, but I wanted to push myself a little bit more and try and attempt to add some colour.
In the beginning of this process, I was very, very confused. I struggled with not knowing what everything meant within the software, which resulted into me becoming frustrated and wanting to leave my character as it was. But I stuck through it and just took my time.
I started with taking a UV snapshot of the model, and saving it as a Jpeg and opening up in Photoshop.
Not wanting to complicate myself too much, I went to my favourite thing in photoshops and added a gradient. I wasn't going too fancy because I didn't want to start running before I could walk. I made the mistake of saving each layer individually in one file, therefore I went back and saved it as a compressed .tiff, and imported it to my material in Maya and it worked!
Looking back I would have liked to have done a more detailed material in Photoshop, but I am very glad that I got the process down and understood how to make my own texture and add it to a character which is very exciting. I am glad that I stuck to what I was doing because know I can challenge myself even further and start to explore what else I can do to my characters.
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