Catlu – Last Project
Please click on images to play GIF (for some reason they won’t play otherwise):
For this project, what I wanted to do was do more coding with Python in Maya. Basically I wanted to practice more coding in Maya, and get to know the Maya-specific coding commands and language like the basic polygon commands and how to find the information on objects and control them. At first I thought I wanted to construct a generative city with Maya, but later decided not to because I realized that with the knowledge I’d be able to get about Maya Python in the time I had, I didn’t think I’d be satisfied at all with how complex I’d be able to make a city. After that, I decided it would be good to explore another useful feature, making objects move in a relation to another object. Originally I wanted to make a projectile object that scattered particles in a field. To do this I started with more basic movements. I had a really hard time this project getting things to work. Whereas last time I used coding to mass produce objects at different angles, this time it was moving objects. Mass-generating objects was definitely a lot easier. Even though the things I was trying to do weren’t supposed to be that hard, I found things to be harder than I thought and more time-consuming. Figuring out Maya’s kinks without a good guide was also challenging. In the end, I could only get basic animation code to sort of work. I generated the lanterns in the scene in their formation using code, and made them move in relation to the mask using code. In the end, I think I learned more about coding in Maya and am more comfortable in it, but definitely need to practice tons more.
Here are the links to the code on Github. Once again WP-Syntax has failed me.
These are not the final versions of the code I used for the animation and creation. Unfortunately my Maya program crashed before I saved the final code, but the code down below are the not-so-final versions of the ones I used.