Argh I can’t believe it, I’ve officially submitted an assignment late now, and by two hours. I was a foolish procrastinator assigning some other work related issues to take my priorities early in the week. So I honestly didn’t really get going on this till Saturday, and there’s no one to blame but myself, but of course as fate would have it crunching is when problems arise. First as has been the case on most assignments the first hour or two is starting the assignment, and then not liking at all what I’ve done, trashing it and starting over. this has happened pretty much every time. Then, as I blocked and then refined the ball of tailor, I had the intention of doing a 180 turn as he jumped against a wall. This didn’t work to well as I got all my timing and spacing and rotations on X, squash and stretch etc done first, with the plan to rotate him on Y after, only to discover the rig isn’t really designed for that. As a TD I should have known to check the rig and add a secondary parent first to make it possible. Fail! Well fortunately I dissected the setup enough to realize a simple cheat especially since tailor has no textures or special features to define direction other than the tail, was to simply animate the Y offset in the orient constraint. It worked out quite well.

I then also ran into a major hurdle throughout all the animating of the tail. I animated the tail straight ahead on 1′s for the whole project, but Maya seemed to just freeze up after a while doing this, I have no clue why. It Meant saving incrementally often, but even then I constantly had to shut Maya down and start up again, and no matter what I always lost a frame or two of work.

So one assignment late, I’m not to happy with myself for that, fortunately the punishment is a loss of a letter on my grade, and I’m not really taking this course for marks overall, but the education. As long as I don’t do it again and make sure I never end up on probation. Of course that means the rest of Sunday has been a busy day starting on my next assignment, because next weekend I’m flying to Germany on important business, but that means I won’t even have a Saturday or Sunday to even work on this weeks assignment.

What is most exciting for me though is that I finally found a way to be able to select controllers through the infernal rotation gizmo. It does require sacrificing the ability to freely tumble in all axis when clicking inside of the rotation gizmo, but honestly that’s a sure fire way to hit gimble lock anyways and I always have advised users never do that in CINEMA 4D, so the same goes for animating in Maya. To set this up simply double click on the rotation tool icon to bring up its options, and you should see one called “Center as Virtual Trackball.” Turn this off an now when you click anywhere inside of the rotation gizmo you get your selection box. This alone improved my workflow on the Tailor rig dramatically. What I find most interesting is every Maya user I’ve brought up this frustration with had no solution, I had suggestions like growing and shrinking the gimzo with the + and – keys, and my one classmate Paul brought up using the Q key to turn off the gizmo, which works but then you need to activate rotate again. Granted I will give everyone I talked to credit that the name isn’t the most obvious either. Anyways, as I learn more and more options and prefs I am making Maya usable, which I guess is what happens as anyone dives deeper into an app.