IMM 211-01 Animation I Tyler Getz

This week, I finished up chapter 2 of the tutorial and completed almost all of chapter 3 (I'm halfway through page 8/14 in the tutorial - Positioning the Texture). In chapter 2, the only part I may have struggled with was the squash and stretch part. I went through all of the steps and got the ball to bounce exactly how you showed in class, but as I continued to follow the rest of the tutorial, it ultimately ended up looking like a regular ball bouncing by the end again (no squash/stretch part anymore). I'm not sure if one of the steps that came after it caused the ball to bounce differently and it's supposed to look how it does, or if I need to redo the squash/stretch step, or something else. Once I'm done with chapter 3 of the tutorial, which is running smoothly so far, I will go back and try to fix the squash/stretch aspect of the ball so it bounces the same way you showed us in class. Attached is a screenshot showing what the scene looks like as of now, at the part ...

This week, I completed chapter 1 of the tutorial and began chapter 2. For chapter 1, I had no trouble creating each of the shapes (sphere, torus, and plane). After getting the scene set up and I moved on to animating the shapes, I was able to stop relying on the tutorial for the most part. I remembered from class how to select specific timestamps on the bottom and translate the ball to the given areas on the plane, and then set a key to indicate the ball's change in position. This part of the tutorial was fairly simple to complete and I was able to create the animation easily, but I got a bit more stuck on the second part of the tutorial. So far, I've successfully added the Persp/Graph layout and have finished up to step 4 of editing the shape of the curve. Step 5 is where I got a bit stuck because I've been trying to select only the first tangent handle by clicking and dragging a box around it, but whenever I try to it selects the entire thing even though I've done the...

The tutorials were pretty simple to understand for the most part, and helped me understand the basics of what to expect from working in Maya, such as how to move, rotate, scale your objects, etc. Although after reading through chapters 1-3 of "The Art of Maya" was a bit more complicated to understand, I definitely have a slightly better idea of what I'm looking at when I open the program. I was pretty overwhelmed using it for the first time, looking at all of the different features and several bars at the top, bottom, and sides of my screen. It's a lot to figure out and get used to, but having this e-book should help a lot with the process of getting used to it. I found the required pages of chapter 3 especially helpful, particularly the diagram shown on page 24. I even screen-shotted it and will put it in with this post so I can come back to look at it when I need help navigating the many different aspects of Maya. 

For the first exercise, I went for something super simple to get me familiar with how Maya works. I spent most of my time familiarizing myself with how the move, rotate, and scale tools work, as I found them a bit complicated to work with at first. It took me awhile to get the shapes exactly right, so I ended up with a pretty simple, unidentified object. The object consists of a wide cylinder base at the bottom, another wide cone shape on top, and a cube shape/rectangular prism connecting the two in the middle. I found it difficult to figure out whether I had lined the shapes up correctly or not, because it would look very different in all 4 boxes any time i moved a shape around, but I think I got it to work. I probably just need more practice with Maya.