Maya Springboard Workshop is now officially over

Hey All,

We had our final Maya Springboard Workshop on the 12th. It was a great learning experience and I learned so much about how to work with Maya. In fact, I am now very confident that I will be able to efficiently work with Maya basics and not have to struggle too much when the actual AM classes begin at the end of this month.

We had so much fun with Aja. Most interesting were the little insights that she gave us time to time about how the industry works. She also gave us a sneak peek at her experiences in the industry and how she overcame obstacles and found the will to carry on. I believe she got a little emotional like everyone of us in the last class. She gave us a lot of tips on how to balance our time between AM, our family and work. Every word of advice that she gave us was very valuable.

Now, we can't wait to start with the actual classes when we get to animate stuff and learn more about animation. So far we did not get an e-critiques from Aja on the quality of our animation except occasionally, since these classes were aimed at learning Maya. But now comes the real deal, where all we will do is learn animation. I still don't know who my mentor will be but should get to know a few days before the classes commence. Oh, I am so excited :)

Animating a Robot Arm

Last week we started animating with rigs and our latest assignment was to make a Robot Arm pick up a can and place it on a block. Since this was a complete rig of a robot arm complete with joints, I initially made a big time mistake and messed up the whole thing. See, the key point here is to setup your preferences to be able to select only the manipulating curves leaving the joints out. If you don't do that, you will end up setting the key frames sometimes on the joints and sometimes on the curves. This really messes the whole thing up. So anyhow, after my first failed attempt with the joints selected, I had no choice but to start over.

The result of my animation exercise is posted here. The concept of the story is that the robot arm is not expecting to see a can there and is casually looking around when all of a sudden it sees the can lying there. So it suspiciously looks around first and then quickly picks up the can and places it on the block. It then inspects the can, but cannot make out it's purpose and so raises it's "hand" in a "What's this?" gesture.



Now the problems that I observe in this clip are:

1. The entire clip appears to move too fast than what it should. So I think I tried to squeeze too many things in just 100 frames
2. The angle at which the robot arm "looks" at the can is not right for the camera view. It actually gets hidden behind the can. I should've changed the arm's angle to look at the can from the top

Anyway, do let me know if you have any other suggestions. I am always open to constructive criticism :)

Kung Fu Panda - Awesome Awesome Awesome movie

Hey All,

My wife and I watched Kung Fu Panda over the weekend and it was an awesome experience. The animation was fabulous, the dialogs were funny and most of all the fun factor was huge. We had a lot of laughs and one time i almost choked on my soda, so be careful :)

Out of all the characters, I loved the Old turtle master (sorry, his name slips my memory.) He is an extremely old turtle and appears to have no teeth when he speaks. The best thing that I liked about him was the slight wobble of his head when he spoke, just as what you would observe in very elderly people. I can imagine the difficulty of making him act while at the same time wobbling his head in a very rhythmic motion. To me doing both would be a little distracting and undoubtedly tougher than simply making a character act.


The Panda is adorable while the Tigress creates and awe about herself with her calm and composed yet menacing style. The other characters are okay but nothing that would make you notice them. Monkey has been voiced over by Jackie Chan and has a teeny tiny role. Personally, I think he was under-utilized but then English isn't one of Jackie's strong points. If you can't see his awesome stunts on screen, listening to his voice doesn't hold much appeal.

I would suggest this movie to anyone who loves to see animated animals at their best.

My First Animation

We started learning some basic animation now :) I am so excited. We learned some basic things about animating in Maya and had to animate a bouncing ball as an assignment.

Here's what I created.

I am yet to discuss this with my mentor, so critiques are most welcome :)

Maya Introduction and Modelling

I am writing after a long gap (at least for now :) ) and I must apologize for that. It's just that work and Maya classes have been keeping me so busy. Our Q&A sessions are progressing as expected and are so much fun. We all look forward to the next session. There are some really talented people in my class and it's really fun watching their work.

As promised, I am adding my assignments here. Remember, these are basics that we are learning and I for one am very new to Maya. Being able to do this much in just 3 weeks itself speaks volumes of how well AM has structured the course. If you ever refer to these, please do not forget to give due credit to AnimationMentor.com :)

Our 1st assignment was to create a Shelf with some basic NURBS primitives.


The 2nd assignment was to use Polygon Primitives and create a human form and set it's hierarchy. Setting the hierarchy allows us to move or pose the character without having to move his "body parts". This kind of ties the character together.


We then learned to model shapes using NURBS and had to create a set with our character. I created a guy playing tennis on Wii in his living room :) See how setting the hierarchy allowed me to easily pose the character here?

Finally it was time to use shaders on our set and light it up :)
Overall, this was a fun exercise. Next session, we start with some real Animation and that is tomorrow!! Yay! I am so excited :)

...And then I made man...

Hey All,

We had our 2nd Q&A last Thursday and we got enough time to work on our next assignment. This time we were supposed to create a block dude who had a sphere for his head, cylinders for his limbs and cubes for his body. Our session went on longer that before but I loved every moment of it. I completed my assignment over the week and will post the final images pretty soon. Things are picking up speed and I am looking forward to future sessions. Aja has been a great mentor so far and really fun. She sings this music to fill the gaps when she's looking for something in Maya or working on something that will take a few seconds to do. I think it's kind of cute. Bobby does the same thing, only his are real cartoon sounds... :D It's hilarious to watch him do that. This makes me wonder though, if almost all animators do that and if it will rub off on me too... LOL!

We had our 1st Q&A session

Yesterday we had our first Q&A session with Aja. It was so much fun to meet everyone from my group. We had a 75 minute class (that's 15 minutes over the limit) but personally I could have gone on for another couple of hours. We started off with intros and as is always the case, Aja was struggling to pronounce my name. So much so that she completely forgot to to cam me. But that was hilarious and she was so embarrassed when I reminded her :D Sorry Aja, but I just had to mention this... LOL! I must admit that I am not really very good at speaking in front of a group of people whose reaction I couldn't even see. So no doubt, I was a little nervous when she cammed me. I am sure I am the biggest dork in my group and they all will agree :D

Over all, the session was great. We went over each of the topics one by one and Aja showed us how to do some of the basic stuff and how to create NURB primitives and that is what the first assignment was all about. Remember, I told you that I was so proud of myself for completing my assignment in just 45 minutes. Well, yesterday my pride was smashed to smithereens when I heard that the entire assignment shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes. And to make matters worse, 45 minutes was on my 2nd attempt. The first one had taken me 2 hours... :O Boy, am I slow as a tortoise or what!! But, on the brighter side, Aja marked her seal of approval on my attempt and said that it looked fine. And for my own satisfaction, I did show an improvement in my second attempt and am hoping that I'll continue to see it over the coming weeks. I'll console myself by remembering that slow and steady win the race (Yeah... right!!)

Learning from Aja was so much fun. I believe she was doing this for the first time and except for a couple of hiccups, it went great. I am now looking forward to my next Q&A session with the group and that's scheduled for coming Thursday (tomorrow.)

Let the Training begin!

We are finally in week 6 and AM opened up some more links for us. We now have access to Training videos, Lectures and Assignments. For the Maya Springboard Workshop, we don't have any pre-recorded lectures yet. Our mentor will be teaching us online in the live Q&A sessions. We have our first one scheduled for Today! Yippeeee!! The wait is finally over.

There has been some confusion regarding the assignments so far. Some of us believe that we are to submit the first assignment (mainly on Translation, Scaling and Rotation) before our first Q&A. Now, since the training videos do cover these concepts, I decided to do mine and have uploaded it already! I am so proud of myself :)

To be honest I found this first assignment so easy only because I had already completed the first chapter of Learning Maya 8 - Foundation! I'd recommend this book to anyone who is starting out with Maya. With it's innumerable tools and functions, working on Maya can get a little over-whelming, especially if you are a beginner. So go ahead guys, buy yourself a copy of this book and get down to learning Maya. I'll keep you posted on how my first Q&A went so keep watching this space for more information.

Iron Man! Simply awesome CG work

We watched Iron Man this week. What can I say, the CG work is amazing! The story of the movie isn't as exciting as I would've liked it to be. Personally, I just didn't get to see enough of Iron Man's action sequences. But I guess this being the first part, the circumstances leading to the origin of the character takes up most part of the movie as is the case with most Super-hero movies. However, the movie ended on a great note and future releases have so much potential for some really cool scripts. I loved the way they showed Stark's Computer UIs in his personal lab and of course the over all action sequences. The movie has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of humor and yet it captivates the essence of Stark's character without making him look like a comedian.

On another note, we had a Live Q&A session with Jay Epperhart last week to check if our cameras were working correctly for the upcoming Q&As with our mentors. So far, I have attended two sessions with Jay, and they are so informative and so much fun. We get to ask him all kinds of questions, some really silly ones too and he is nice enough to patiently answer each one of them. Thanks for being such a sport Jay :)

My first Q&A with my mentor, Aja Bogdanoff is scheduled for Tuesday and I am so looking forward to it. I will be posting the details on how it went, so stay tuned guys!

WooHoo! Bobby's webinar was fun

Last night I attended Bobby's webinar and heard him talk about AnimationMentor.com. He told us how he, Shawn and Carlos came up with the idea and what prospects AM offers to the students. Can you believe that the placement rate of AM worldwide is a whopping 80%? Wow! That's amazing, isn't it?

He also interviewed Aja Bogdanoff who told us about some of her experiences with AM and how the AM experience helped her improve her work. So far, she has worked on Coca-Cola's movies, Horton Hears A Who and is presently working on Open Season II with Reel FX.

Bobby's energy levels were amazingly high (nothing new there :) ) and his sound effects were hilarious. He makes these funny sounds like those from a kid's cartoon when he is reading something on the screen. All-in-all, it was a great session.

By the way, in case you are interested in joining AM or knowing more about it, visit www.AnimationMentor.com. There's a special discount offer for the Summer Term that can be availed at www.AnimationMentor.com/apply/apply.html

So, check it out guys!

Last week before the wait is over

We started with the Maya Springboard Workshop on March 31st, 2008 and so far have been introduced to the various features on AM's website each week. Although it is exciting to meet all these cool people and to get to know them, the wait for some real action is killing. The good news is that now that we are in week 5, our classes begin next week. Yay!!

It appears I am one of the very few people in my class with almost no exposure to animation before and will have to really crank up my efforts just to be able to catch up with them. I have started feeling my way around Maya's UI, following the Learning Maya 8 Foundation book and am loving the different things that I am already able to do.

I have made some very good friends on AM in the last 4 weeks, who I intend to work with during the duration of the course and maybe later too :) So we have a nice group thing going. The way AM works is by placing us under the wings of an Animation expert who is working in the animation industry and they act as our mentors guiding us in the right direction. We get to work with 6 different mentors over the 18 month course (7 mentors for me since I opted for Maya Springboard Workshop as well.) My very first mentor is Aja Bogdanoff who was part of the team that worked on Horton Hears A Who and will be featured in Bobby Beck's webinar tonight (April, 30th.) It's a must watch and I'll advise you guys to try and attend it if possible. Bobby's a really great guy, very enthusiastic and very friendly. Yes, you can tell just by watching him speak about animation :)

Boy, I am so excited and eager to begin learning some animation!!