Maya, also known as Autodesk Maya, is a program used to make CGI models, games and animations.
(An example of the Maya UI - credit: The Gnomon Workshop)
For this session, we learnt some of the basics of Maya's workspace, how to model simple shapes and elements, and how to animate them.
In Maya, you create things out of primitive shapes; cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc. Through various means of manipulating faces, edges and vertices, you can change how they look and how they go together. We started out by using the sphere shape to start to create a classic-looking flying saucer.
First, we took a sphere and scaled it up on all factors, essentially just making it a bigger sphere. From there, we brought one of the dimensions down, turning it from a sphere into more of a frisbee-like, flatter shape. We had the saucer bit of our flying saucer!
Next was the main dome of the saucer. That was easy enough; just make a new sphere, scale it up a little bit, and then change it's position so that it's in the right place on the saucer. We then used that sphere as an anchor point for smaller domes surrounding it. Using a duplication shortcut combined with the new anchor point, Maya was able to create a circle of domes surrounding the anchor point.
At that point, there was a complete UFO! Then came the animation.
I'd never crossed paths with CGI animation, so I was genuinely surprised to find out that animating in that medium worked exactly how I thought it would. You set up individual keyframes, adjusting the object's position, scale, rotation, etc. And then Maya fills in the movements between! It's similar to how Premiere Pro and After Effects deal with moving elements, but I never expected it of a professional CGI program. This is called interpolation, where the frames between keyframes are approximated by the program.
While learning how to do basic animation, we found out how to create nested animations within them. For this, we decided we wanted the UFO to continually spin as the main movements went on. For this, we went into the object's own timeline, and found it's Y axis control. In it's line graph, we changed the value so that it would continue going upwards. Through that, it allowed the UFO to just keep spinning!
After we finished up with the UFO, we were let loose with trying to model a cow all on our own. We were allowed to have fun with it, so I made a cow using some ridiculous proportions and shapes. And also a top hat.
(I dubbed him "Mr. Bull")
So we had a UFO, and we had a cow. The last thing we modelled was a tractor beam. While making it, we learned how to apply colours to our models (which we then added to the cow and UFO). Flat colours are called lamberts, and shiny textures are called phongs. A bright blue lambert was applied to the tractor beam, and then it's opacity was brought down by about 50% to give it some transparency.
The tractor beam was then parented to the UFO; this means that the two travel together, but can still be manipulated individually.
Now we had all the elements to make our animation; a UFO abducting a cow. This meant manipulating all 3 objects created, but at different times. I started by blocking out the UFO's movements. The animation starts and ends with it, so it'd be a good indication of how long things needed to last for. The UFO stays still for about 60% of the time it's on screen, sharing 20% on each end for it's moving in and out of shot.
Next was the tractor beam. It had it's scale manipulated to get bigger, remain big for a couple of seconds, then recede back. I had it's anchor point set to it's top point, so when it got bigger, it was growing out from that point.
The cow was next to be animated, which would then be animated in the timespan that the tractor beam was onscreen. It needed to get dragged up by the beam, and disappear into the ship. I did that, and added a slight change in rotation to give off a more floaty look.
I added one final touch of my own... I noticed that there was a text tool, so I wanted to add a little "moo" coming from the cow. So I did that.
And the animation was done!
Overall, I'm really happy with both the animation and the introduction to Maya in general! Being completely honest, I was not expecting myself to find Maya as (for lack of a better term) easy and user friendly as it was; I actually understood it, unlike After Effects. Everything is laid out how I would've expected it, and things do what you want! It shares traits to other programs I've dabbled with, but in a way that makes the translation from 2D to CGI usage easy to understand! While I'm happy with the animation that came out of this session, I think I want to go back and add in more details; model in a barn, a background, and more cows to make a more interesting animation!
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