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.