Now It Spins!

We can animate with Maya now! We took our last project (the ice cream shop) and made the ice cream cone, scooper, and bowl of ice cream spin.

Process
      There really weren't all that many steps in the process, but it still took me a long time to really figure out. I hit a bump pretty early on trying to get it to actually spin. The pivot point wasn't in the center so when it would spin it would go off the table. You know, as it does. I had to call in backup to figure out how to fix it. Luckily, we did get it fixed and could get back to work.
   
      Rendering turned out to be a whole different story. It took me days to get it out of the door. I had a really hard time finding all of the different required steps and settings and that really set me back. I had to render it out a couple times to get it to actually work right. Once all 120 pictures were rendered, we put them into After Effects. This all made me run out of time to go back and fix the bump maps.

Bump maps and Textures
If you watched the video, you may have noticed something was off. The bump maps and different textures look normal when they are still in Maya, but that's not quite true when you're watching it as a video. If you look closely (or even at all), you will notice that the textures and bump maps don't turn with their respective objects. But, you know what, for my first ever 3d animation, I think it turned out pretty good.

Final thoughts
I can't even imagine what our next 3d animation will look like or if it will be this simple. I'm excited to see what's in store!