At the beginning of the week, I had never used the program MAYA before, I have some experience with blender which is probably the most similar program although never maya. Being that it was brand new to me I was very excited to learn it, starting of easily with remodeling a cube I attempted to add a face too it rather unsuccessfully, nevertheless it was the beginning of learning the shortcuts within the program such as an undo and generally getting a feel for it and learning to navigate it faster, but it was obvious to me that I had a lot to learn. We then moved onto building something that was a little bit easier to conceptualize, a cyber truck. this was something that I really enjoyed, and I began to understand how to run the program more efficiently, learning how to extrude and manipulate the faces and the vertex points, following this i was fascinated to learn how add the colors and textures to the image, following this I added a shadow, and a background was linked. the most difficult part was probably making the shadow work. the reason for this is because within the 3D environment there was actually a bridge overhead making it hard for the sun to cast a viable shadow. I figured out how- to get around this issue by adding a light to the file which was something I had not done before. I had come in for the individual practice session one morning and decided to follow an online tutorial, in doing so i built this 3D hand which i was quite proud of as some of the dimensions within this model were quite difficult to achieve. using the extrude tool and the vertex tool I worked further on my MAYA skills and began to feel like i was able to freestyle within the program much more easily.
Unreal Engine
Out of my own interest and having some knowledge of the program I decided to spend some time working in unreal engine and giving it a chance to learn dance in the past I have never had access to it. I created a very limited but cool arctic wasteland, this was exciting for me as this is a program I’ve wanted to start using for a long time and when I discovered it was accessible on the university computers, I was excited to try it.
