Our First Try on Maya

After we had finished doing the digital drawings of the old woman we had a lesson straight away with Robin Ledger. Robin specializes in Maya, a computer program which Game designers and Animators use in their projects. Its essentially creating a highly detailed model on Maya using the different tools at your disposal. We will be using this program to create many different objects, in turn putting it into a playable area in Unity.

When we first opened up the project I was a bit overwhelmed, as I had never used Maya before, luckily for us we were told that we were to open and create a lynda.com account. Lynda.com is basically a archive full of tutorials for students. By creating an account it meant that we can now access these tutorials at any time that we want.

Getting back to Maya, we told to open this document that was located in MyUCA, it was of an old silo. Robin the preceded to tell us that we would be making this for the next several hours. I looked around the room to see a row of motionless eyes, at the time I felt, this was impossible.

"The Silo"

Robin was very helpful throughout the time we were making the silo. Several times I came across problems such as "how do I join objects together?" or "How do I create edges?" but Robin was there to sort out any inconveniences. I think that its quite a creative way of learning, if I were to make a mistake and I was taught how to fix it, then id be happier than if I were to do it perfectly the first time and come across the same problem later in life and not know how to solve it.

A basic design of "The Silo"

As you can see above I managed to get a basic model of the silo. The image above is what I managed to get done in the lesson. It was certainly a learning curve, at first it was extremely hard and I was clueless, but as time went by, it defiantly came easier.

My favorite part of the model that I created was the merging cylinders, this is because they merge together perfectly and mirror the true image fairly well.

I had a slight problem when it came to the end of the lesson. When I went to go and save my scene in Maya onto my external hardrive, it wouldn't let me. At first I thought that it may have been that I didn't name my project as it wont let you save if you don't, but still, no save. I then managed to get Robin's attention and we decided to send it and save it as a 3Ds Max file. The 3Ds Max is essentially the same thing as Maya. It does exactly the same job, the only thing is that we are taught on Maya as most of the companies in the video game industry use it, where as 3Ds Max is only used by a small percentage of the companies.