Ever since I was little I have wanted to work for Disney, and as I grew older, that interest has evolved to pertain to the field of computer animation. Regardless of this interest, I had never actually had an experience in the field prior to the beginning of my mentorship at Carnegie Mellon. As a result, the first week or so of my employment consisted of learning the basics of the widely used modeling program called Maya. Maya is a very complex program and even now, I have only brushed the surface of the many things that you can do with it. However, at the beginning of the summer, I essentially was guided through a crash course in Maya. After learning the basic functions that are used to manipulate projects within the program, I began to create my first model.

Of course not wanting to get in over my head from the very beginning, I chose to model a bear. That way I would be able to start from a basic spherical form and build the rest of the bear’s body up from there. To create the head, I attached another smaller sphere to the body (as you are probably starting to realize I was modeling a “stuffed” bear as opposed to a realistic looking bear). From there I next needed to make the arms, legs and also the snout of the bear.

To do this, I selected the faces of the sphere that were in the general vicinity of where I wished the body parts to be. From there I extruded the faces outwards to create extensions that would eventually be modeled into the forms I wanted. Once these basic shapes were created, I altered the shapes to be smoother and flow better with the rest of the body by moving the vertices of the faces in different positions. Next I dealt with more detailed work mostly within the face, creating eyes, a brow, and ears. By increasing the number of polygons that are used within a model, the detail becomes more precise and intricate, and flow more effectively throughout the entire piece. It also makes for a smoother edge within the model. After I completed the basic model of the bear and cleaned up the lines, the next step was to texture it.

To texture the bear, I first needed to create a texture map of the bear’s form. This meant that I basically had to flatten out the shape, similar to flattening out a globe, so that I could easily paint the surface. Once that was done, I was ready to import the flattened image into Adobe Photoshop. From there, I used the tools in Photoshop to color and texture my bear. At first it was very difficult to differentiate the different aspects of the bear’s anatomy so that I could effectively design its skin. However, as I continued to work and better grasp the concept, I was able to design more intricate details and shadows upon the bear’s surface. When I had completed the actual design process within Photoshop, I was then able to import the file back into Maya and assign it as the surface material for the bear’s figure. This signified the end of the actual modeling and designing of the bear. From there, I learned the steps that would enable me to eventually animate my bear.

In order to allow the bear to move, I first needed to create a skeleton within the model. When making the skeleton, you begin first with the root, which is usually located within the center of the model, and extend the joints outward from there, making sure that all of the points where the bear’s joints will bend from are accounted for. After the skeleton is built, the next step is to “skin” the model. Contrary to what the term seems to mean, “skinning” is the process of attaching the skeleton to the model that you have created. After the initial skinning of the bear, you are able to select different joints and rotate and move them to different positions. As a result of the “skinning,” the form of the bear should move along with the movement of the skeleton.

Of course, if this was all of the steps required to set up a model to be animated, it would be easy. However as you may have guessed, that was not the case. The next step in completing the skeleton setup was to “paint the weights” which describes the method of selecting the areas around a specific joint that you want to move when it is selected. “Painting weights” is a very tedious process in which you must make sure that there are no breaks in the model when the joints move and that the correct limbs are moving with their respective joints. This step requires a lot of patience and determination and simply takes practice in order to do it well.

Once the weights were painted, I was finally ready to animate the bear. At first I was content with simply making the bear walk across the screen, but after some persuasion, was convinced to make him dance as well. Granted the dancing is nothing spectacular, he perhaps may want to watch “Saturday Night Fever” a few times before actually trying the moves out in public, but for a first animation I was extremely proud of myself.

The next step after animating the bear was to create a scene that would provide the background for the movement of the bear. I decided to keep everything simple so as not to take away from the focus on the bear. So basically I created a ground plane on which the bear could stand and walls around him to create a room-like space. I added a simple pillow in the back so that it seemed like the bear began the animation sitting up against it before he stood up and walked across the room.

At that point I had covered all of the basics of Maya and was able to go on to “bigger and better” projects that actually aided the work my mentor and her colleagues were doing. I learned a lot from simply jumping into the program and beginning a project on my own. Granted I had a lot of help, but by experimenting with different tools and techniques on my own I was able to gain a greater understanding of the program than if I had only read about it.