AM Springboard: Week 4

This week was awesome! We finally had our first Q&A! It was more like a meet and greet with my mentor and classmates. I had to introduce myself and give my mentor a quick recap of my Maya experience, past education and why I wanted to study animation. We also talked about our favorite movies, cartoons and animation studios. Our second Q&A with my mentor was an hour long demo to get the class ready for the first Springboard assignment. Jason, my mentor, went over Maya's user interface, basic navigation hot keys, creating basic geometry and customizing our user preferences. He was super informative and gave us some really cool tips and tricks for us to use in our assignment - I'll be posting later on this week some of my notes from the class.

My first assignment consisted of placing nurbs objects on a shelf and match it as close as possible to the reference image. It was pretty straight forward, but I'm sure for those who had never used Maya before it could be challenging. Specially, when trying to learn the navigation tools, hot keys, different camera views, etc. for the first time. It's a lot of info to take in one hour! My best advice is take as much notes as possible.

It was a great week overall! And before I forget, just as a side note - Q&A's and leaving feedback to other students on their work can be quite addicting! :)

Here's the final render of my 1st Springboard assignment...

- Jose