Mayan Adventure

This week saw a return to basics, getting back to grips with Maya after a 3 year affair with 3D Studio Max. While this most recent relationship had at often times been tumultuous, it did bear many great fruits and I hope as many of the hard-won battles as possible can be carried back to my first love, (first that is, after DPaint).

The first surprise I got was the ease with which I was able to fall back into the navigation controls, which are quite dissimilar to Max but became second nature after just an hour of trial and error, and the same muscle-memory familiarity came back with with a little basic parenting/un-parenting hierarchy manipulation.

The second and greater surprise was how much I was affected by an uncomfortable sense of deja-vu working with controls that reminded me of darker pre-BioWare times when I wasn’t supported by a sizeable and talented team of technical animators that could customise our workflow at my and the other animators’ every whim.

Despite all this though, the whole exercise was an incredibly refreshing change. Made all the more enjoyable by the test subject I had to play around with, the latest HD rendition of Eidos’s very own poster girl, making a day of trial-and-error a real pleasure with such a fine model.