Week 1 ( Starting from May 28th ):I started my summer research this Wednesday. The first assignement Alla gave we was to read the book "Leaning Maya -- Fundation" and complete the bouncing ball project. Through this week's work, I found that Maya is a pretty wonderful tool. I could add special effect to a generated character and make a short movie with it.] It was really fun to create the bouncing ball movie in Maya.

Week 2 ( June 1st ): This week I went on and did the primitive man project. If the bouncing ball project last week was to get me to get familiar with fundamental tools in Maya, this week's project introduced me to IK techniques, manipulations of animation curves, and hypergraphs that is the core of Maya. I will need to understand the dependency graph/hypergraph pretty well when I will write plug-ins for Maya in the coming weeks.

Week 3 ( June 8th ): This week was a little more challenging, for I putted away the interesting movie-making, and began to write my own plug-in for Maya in C++. Alla gave me several animation related research paper to read, as well as some reference books. At the beginning, I feel a little overwhelmed by the amount of new information and new ideas that came at once. But fortunately I managed to follow Alla's instructions and get started with a simple plug-in. I felt much better at the end of the week when I got my plug-in to work properly. But the more important thing is that i learned to search for information, which I found essential in research, because whenever I have to do something new I will know where to find the useful information or help when it is needed. I found that the online manuals of Maya and Visual C++ are very helpful. Further, I learned not to be afraid of making mistakes for it is a good way to learn.

Week 4 ( June 15th ): This week things went much smoother. I think it is because I have gotten more familiar with how to write Maya plug-ins. I found that there are lots of pre-defined functions in Maya, and in order to work efficiently, the trick is to get as familiar as possible with these handy functions. And that was what I did. This week, I finished writing a plug-in that will automatically load motion captured files and then animate the motion in Maya. I did so by creating animation curves from the input data to control the character's motion. It was fun, and I am glad I did it.