Week 1: Intro to Maya

This is week 1 of a 9-week course is called "Maya Fast Track" and so far, its living up to it's name. We are being inundated with info and the learning curve is steep. I am writing so fast i can't even read my notes! (which i cant anyway, even writing normal since my writing is so poor). I think I'll get a digital recorder so i can listen to the class later on.

Anyway, our instructor this week is Steve McClure, who has worked at various places and published a few Gnomon DVDs as well. He is a good guy for this class since he kind of knows like everything about 3d there is to know, no joke. He is amazing.

This week we quickly went through the whole 9-week class with an overview to all the areas we will be touching on, as well as learning the interface and getting used to navigating around Maya. Classes are Mon-Fri, 9am to 4pm with an hour break for lunch. We took a short, easy project through completion including modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering. We don't get much time to work on what we are learning in class, so most of that happens after class in the lab, which is from 4pm to 7, but we have been staying much later than that and the lab is open until 1am, 7 days a week. I have been staying up and working on class stuff til 3am just about every night, but I think the sleep deprivation will come back to hurt me if I cant concentrate the next day. Still trying to find a balance regarding that. Anyway, here are some quick shots of stuff we did this week ...


this is a screen cap of just a simple scene we created with maya primitives and little editing. We had to use Maya's lighting and renderer (couldnt use Mental Ray) so it's not so photo-real, but was a good project to just start to get used to the tools.


we had to light a daytime version, with light coming thru a window ...

and a night-lit one as well. As I said, its not earth-shattering, but a good exercise nonetheless.

So far the instruction is right on and I feel could learn a lot here, as long as put in the effort. : )