Today I redid the shading for Linky, and did this very simple animation! Maya only crashed twice and froze once… I’m a little perplexed how this is the industry standard at this crash rate hah.
I learned:
While this was mostly review of previous knowledge, this helped me conceptualize how hypershade works. I got experience adjusting shaders, using the workspace, understanding how the output and naming system works with material groups. The material groups were already set from when I imported the model, however I assume the concept would be the same for me to create them in Maya myself.
I learned how to export an animation sequence. I can’t find the button directly in Maya (as it appears less than a year ago they removed the ‘render’ button from the top bar), but I Control+F searched for it and used it that way. For sequences it’s important to change the render settings -> frame/animation -> set to ‘name.#.ext’. And then one can change the frame range.
Oh also!! I realized why some objects kept moving around two days ago. It wasn’t a render layers thing but a keyframe thing! I also learned it’s useful to change the pivot (press D then translate) of the camera to allow for easy animatable rotation around an object (this is actually super neat. I didn’t have to parent it to a null object like in Blender!), and to use the middle mouse button to move keyframes in the graph editor.
I am still confused on:
Where is the actual ‘render’ button? Also Maya kept crashing when I tried to add a mesh light to an object. What’s up with that?
Isaac Gazmararian 