Maya Tutorials

After countless hours setting up Maya and watching the videos, I was frustrated beyond belief. Then I found the example files and it all started falling into place. Stephanie and I sat down at about 1 o’clock and started working. It was a lot easier with another person because it helped to talk about what was going on and usually one person got it. So the first thing we wanted to learn was depth of field. The tutorials used a cool robot to explain it. First we learned what it was, which is to make an image look more realistic by adjusting the focal distance of the camera. After that we learned how to connect a camera to an object and find its distance to put into the depth of field. Then we rendered it and saw that it was really grainy. To fix it we adjusted the contrast threshold. I adjusted a section from the buttons on the robots chest to the eye. I did not change the whole image because of the time it would have taken to render it all would have been substantial.

Global illumination

On to Global Illumination! We spent a while learning about how to use the global illumination settings and they were fun! GI is when light photons bounce around the image. This makes the image more realistic because it picks up color from other objects and carries it to slightly color the surrounding objects. The things with GI is that it took a lot of tweaking numbers to get it to look right but in the end it really looked cool.

Overall

Ok so overall that took a while. For me and those disk and maya and everything, it just never all worked at the same time. It finally did all work and I did some cool looking renderings and learned a lot more interesting things than I thought I would starting out. My favorite would have to be depth of field. Even though this is a fairly easy item to add to an image, I have some strange love of it. Maybe its the really cool robot, maybe it was my first major thing to learn from the tutorial(after spending hours learning things I didn't use and didn't really need to watch at the moment), maybe it is because I love the contrast between blurry and sharp. Who knows? The thing I do know is that I learned some really cool techniques from this tutorial and I can learn more from it(when I have the free time, which is rare).