Maya animation workshop #2 (character rig)

In this workshop we explored basic rigging, as well as animation with a pre-made character rig. For the first part of the session, we made a tail with some basic bones and controls so that we could deform the mesh for animation. This wasn’t too challenging. However, in regards to this we didn’t dive very deep into rigging, leaving out more complex tasks such as weight painting and constraints. Whilst I have done weight painting and rigging in blender, I am still unsure of certain aspects of creating more complex character rigs in Maya. This in turn makes me somewhat unsure of animating my final outcome in Maya verses blender as it may turn out quicker to rig models in a program that I know rather then trying to learn as I go in Maya.

After this however we practiced basic animation with a pre-made character rig of a squirrel. The rig was very cool to use, however it did have some functional issues that limited what it could do. Never the less it made good practice for animating in Maya, with me having made a small animation. This time round the process for rendering the image sequence and converting it to film was much easier, although I still found it to be a little clunky at times. Despite this however, the animation process in Maya is the first thing about the program that I have genuinely liked, with many of its other features being weighed down by its unintuitive UI. However, it is worth mentioning that I don’t have any other reference point for CGI animation so its hard to say how it compares to other programs.