finally

[egypturnash]

*stops pondering silly internet drama*
*wishes she had a ceiling fan*
*boots Maya* (which takes a good couple of minutes)

Okay, this is an intimidatingly button-laden window. It is, however, friendlier-looking than Lightwave or Max or suchlike. Also, any 3D tool that includes subsection titles in the manual like "Converting breakdowns into keyframes" is one that's going a long way to speak my language. I can deal.

*starts tutorials*

Comments

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Woo! Good luck!

Also... In the tutorials, when you get to rigging your character in the 'IK man' tutorial and it suddenly seems like the bones aren't working right, this is a 'new feature' not a bug. Uncheck 'IK/FK switching' in the animation menu and suddenly it will start working right. I spent the better part of three days laboriously rebuilding my skeleton again and again only to discover that that was a 'New feature' for 5.0 and was defaulted to ON, so it isn't mentioned in the tutorials.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks. Right now I'm going through the first-run startup movies to learn the absolute basics - it'll probably be a few days before I get to that one!

I've also tweaked the Wacom stylus settings for click/mclick/rclick for Maya and wondered if the mouse might not be better for this... though my index finger hurts just thinking that. Maybe not. I can really see a week of playing with it resulting in some arcanely modified input settings that fit my hand best...

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Oof. Yeah. I tried using the stylus too but reverted to the mouse. The stylus is REALLY GREAT for doing NURBS sculpting when constructing a model. It's also great for painting on textures and stuff like that, but for most of the actual manipulation it seems to be a pain to use.

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

Maya is great. Maya is spectacular. Maya is... easily the single most complex piece of software I've ever touched in my life. It's one of those programs where you can use it for ten years straight and still not know how half the stuff in it works.

So... don't give up if you get a lil' frustrated. It all makes sense, eventually, it just might not be obvious at first. ;)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oh, like AI.

Grrr, I want to swap 'space' and 'opt'. My hand KNOWS that I hold 'space' to move around the canvas. Ah well, I shall manage to create a Maya-using modality in my muscle memory.

[esche.livejournal.com]

Lightwave scared the pants off of me. Most 3D tools do, honestly, and it's probably because the most I can grasp as far as my art being 3D is like, having it tattooed on someone.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Maya's at least cuter than LW.

I can see how to work in the thing, I've flipped through books many a time, I have an idea of the workflows, and I think pretty dimensionally in my art; it's just a matter of learning the thing.

Krishna Ohm

[acertaindoebear.livejournal.com]

All is Maya

*hugs*

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

> Okay, this is an intimidatingly button-laden window. It is, however, friendlier-looking than Lightwave or Max or suchlike.

And with that paradox, the universe collapsed into itself. Maya is only matched by GIMP when it comes to intuitiveness; good luck. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the ludicrous configurability. Which I'm not going to think of touching yet.

If I really stopped and looked at the way I have AI set up, it's just as intimidating to a newcomer - I have pretty much every control I need a couple of stylus pokes away, at most, if not right there in front of me all the time. I don't think about it any more because I've learnt them all gradually. Same with any complex piece of software. FLash was intimidatig, now it's just annoying; FCPro was scary the first few days. And Maya's tutorials look to be a lot better than the ones that came with FCPro!

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I think of all the 3D modellers I've used, Blender (http://www.blender3d.com/) is the one that scares me the least, and it's free too. Worth a look if Maya drives you nuts :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I tried Blender once. The lack of a functional undo was... um... rather a damper on my interest in it. So far I seem to be grasping the basics of Maya.

[defenbaugh.livejournal.com]

Oy ya.. Maya I agree is deep. A good habit to get into now, is naming the objects, and after completeing them. FREEZE TRANSFORM, and DELETE HISTORY BY TYPE.


This resets all those wacky numbers XYZ Rotate, scale, blah blah to 1's
So when you go to animate you dont get fucked topology or odd happenings.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember you grumbling about that!

I just pulled in the temple tutorial I did, selected everything, tried rotating it, and laughed as it shattered into its component parts, swirling around each other... then I undid that motion, and grouped them all together, and it rotates as one object.

Then I looked in the Hypergraph and discovered grouping it like that flattened the sub-group hierarchy. Boo. Oh, I see, if I switch to selecting by hierarchy instead of selecting by object type, it then acts properly when I group it, maintaining the sub-groups. Yay!