Any recommendations on how to be more proficient in Maya?

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3 comments, last by hplus0603 2 years, 5 months ago

Hello,
I am a current student for Game Design and Programming and I am trying to find more ways to be proficient within Maya. This includes smoothing out my animations so they don't look so chalky in certain movements. Better my understanding of character mesh rigging, manually and using the HumanIK tool. And 3D modeling and UV mapping in general, I have created a few models before but I lack the understanding of creating and cutting the UV maps to texture my models.

Any information will be greatly appreciated,

Jordan Harris

None

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This is not a Game Design question. Moving to a more appropriate forum.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

@Tom Sloper thanks.

None

Build lots of content. Download some new character/rig from the internet and animate it, once a day, for one to two hours a day. Study what you did, and take notes for tomorrow. Focus on a particular area per month. One month it's secondary motion; another month it's facial expression; after that it's mechanical movement, and so on.

Look at a lot of youtube tutorials. There are both good and bad ones – see them all, work through them all, you can learn in each case. Also read some classes/courses/books/videos. Anything that lets you get insight into how other people are doing things!

Finally, once you have a very good insight into critiquing yourself and what the different areas are (from the books and tutorials) it will make sense to start looking at finished animated projects, and critiquing them, like you'd critique yourself, and then trying to re-make them with some fixes that you'd identified.

It's really a product of “how much time do you spend in the tool” times “how deliberate are you about practicing and critiquing specific skills.” So, not only do you need to do the work, you need to do the work of focusing on which parts to practice and iterate!

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