Maya Man Ben

Maya animation is cool.

Have spent a month doing Maya cg stuff. A week learning with Matt Leonard was cool, a very patient man who sure does know what he's doing.

I was given a project from the Dinamo studio for which I had to build a character and make him move across a river. When I was given this I really had a panic as I thought that there was no way that I could possibly finish this on time but this is pretty much the way that I react whenever I am given a brief, it is the panic that gets me moving and keeps the work lively and I haven't missed a deadline yet.

The computer continues to trouble me and even though I managed to finish the project I was unable to render it as the computer was taking at one point an hour and a half for each frame when it should have taken about six minutes.

I could have done with the programme at home to work on but I was unable to get it as my operating system was a month too old, this was a pain. Have decided to buy a new apple laptop which will become my Maya machine. This is a big thing for me as I have for such a long time thought of myself as someone who would never get to grips with anything more that clay and pencils.

I will admit that I treated Maya very much like stop motion moving the character frame by frame rather than letting the computer inbetween but this is what I liked about it, stop motion without the mess and the standing under hot lights problem. This is not to say that I will be giving up the claymation I will be combining it with Maya and I will make some great stuff. Also a few years ago I came up with an idea for a film that would have cost me thousands of pounds to make because of the size of the sets, this film is now back on the list of stuff to be made.

In short I like Maya, I like it a lot. Well done Ben you have taken your first steps into a much larger world.