In retrospect I should have 'kept my hand in' with Maya, as I hadn't really used it since our animation assignment and in truth was happy to leave it behind and now picking it back up again and incorporating the new information and facets of Maya is proving troublesome. I've been spending as much time as I can on Maya, relearning the ropes and getting to grips with the hierarchy that we have been taught.
In truth, learning hierarchy was not as difficult as I thought it might be, this is probably because hierarchy itself is quite intuitive and learning the order of parenting especially with humanoid models is as simple as thinking about which order my own body obeys the rules of the skeletal structure for instance the wrist having the least rotational and smaller joints having less rotation and having to move in relation to when and how the larger connected joints move. I researched forward kinematics and inverse kinematics, specifically inverse kinematics since this is what we would be using in Maya. Forward kinematics means that the in order for the model to move, the parent joint moves first, then the next ‘child’ down the hierarchy and then the next child.
Example of forward kinematics below...
Fortunately the type of modelling and animating we would be doing allowed for inverse kinematics once we had got the hang of the basics. According to Kuperberg et al (2002) inverse kinematics more closely mimics how the body moves but can be far more complex to rig and animate (2002:103). Using IK animation means that if for instance a leg was animated then all that would be needed to move the leg from point a to point be is to move the foot and the rest of the leg would follow.
With all the above in mind I tried some simple animations in Maya, just using small, easy-to-animate forms such as my MayaBirds animation which can be viewed in my folders.
Maya birds screenshot
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