Maya animation workshop #3 (walk cycle)

In this Maya workshop we expanded upon the last session by animating a full walk cycle. For this we were shown various animation techniques such as the step-up mode whilst allowed us to create the major key frames before working on the in-betweens.

Whilst this session was very informative for animating in Maya, I found it very difficult to follow. This was because at the time I was very stressed due to the uncertainty of my Uni course cancelation. This led to the trial-and-error process being much more difficult, with me losing my patience when I had made a small error for the second time that meant I had to start the animation again. Because of this I decided to stop and just listen to the workshop so that I could try again at a stage where I was in a better head space.

This led me to pick up the walk cycle again a couple of days later, when I was less stressed. From this I found the animation process to go much more smoothly than it had in the workshop, with me having learnt from my mistakes and being able to create a looping walk cycle. Ultimately, I do like the animation in Maya and would like to use it in my project. The only issue is that there are many other aspects of Maya that I either don’t like or don’t know well enough to be confident in using for the final outcome. This led me to contemplating using both blender and Maya for the project however that opens up various problems in transferring work from one program to another. This isn’t really an issue for modelling, but it is one for shading, rigging and most likely animation. This ultimately means that I can either just use blender for modelling and Maya for everything else, or just use one program for everything. Due to me having a much broader knowledge of textures and shaders in blender I am tempted to just use that. However, I don’t yet know how good blenders animation is yet which is still a major factor to consider.