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!