Monday 16th - Friday 20nd October - Maya

This we were taught Maya. Matt taught us this 3D package for 3 days covering a lot of the content of the package including:

- Rendering
- Particle effects
- Animation
- Modeling

The package was vast and it was easy to become confused by all the menu's, the biggest problem was finding the feature you wanted. I spent a lot of time hunting through menu's and tables as well as the help trying to find what I was after. Matt was a great teacher and he was very clear and enthusiastic. He was inspiring and the first 3 days went by very quickly even though a lot was packed in.

The last 2 days were concerned with getting on with a brief. The brief was too complete a 10 second ident for a fictional music channel of our choice. I have had a few ideas but decided to base mine on a rock channel called BOOM MUSIC. I had the idea of starting with a wire and following a buldge up its length until it enters the back of the speaker. The camera then spins round the speaker and revels that the wire links the speaker to some large words- boom music. A tag line also had to be include. I really enjoyed this brief, it was sometimes frustrating but I think I have a natural aptitude for working in 3D, possibly something to do with my dislexia.

I got the majority of the modeling done in 2 days which was great. It was a good idea to stick with a simple idea and do it well. One obstacle when starting the brief was knowing how long it would take to model and animate. As I had never used the program before I had no idea how long things took and in that respect my solution to the brief was a good one. I was able to add detail or remove it depending on time.