Binding the Mesh of my Personal Maya Model (Of which point mistakes were made)

Right, this was the point where all my work so far on creating my personal Maya model would be put to the test because if my model didn't fully work at this stage I could not progress and I would have to go back and fix my mistakes... which is exactly what happened.

I think I probably ended up binding the mesh to the joints of my Maya model about five times before everything worked. One problem that kept occurring was that I kept finding joints that were not correctly oriented, if oriented at all (as I mentioned in the previous post). This meant I kept on having to go back and re-orient these controls. Personally I do not have the best memory and I will often have forgotten would I had just done five minutes ago so of course having to backtrack would confuse me to the extent I would get myself tangled in a Maya-like web.

The stages of binding the mesh of my model and attempting painting the influence weights of my Maya model took me around nine hours. Of course it shouldn't take that amount of time. I had just made to many mistakes that all needed fixing, all these mistakes seemed minor at the time and the errors were simply down to me, aware that I was behind on work trying to rush Maya. And another point I have learnt with working with Maya is that you simply cannot rush it. Maya is a complicated software but it does become pretty straight forward to understand when you take a breath and go through each step slowly, paying close attention to detail.

Because I had rushed, I was now paying for it.

Another point I have learnt from working with Maya is that you cannot do it tired. I'm one of those people that when I have had an extreme deficiency of sleep I tend to forget things, kind of like Edward Norton's character from Fight Club. And forgetfulness is not a good thing for working with Maya. When I'm tired and aware that I'm making mistakes it is simply a waiting game of when to give up completely.

After this session where mistakes kept on being made, I came back to it after a few days after having returned from Manchester Animation Festival. I was amazed at the difference. I was able to fix the problem I was struggling with in under forty five minutes and everything just became so much clearer to me.