Opening Maya

After yesterday's lecture i was pretty nervous about having to learn maya on my own.  Already a bit confused on some of the terms learned in class I decided i better start learning it early and as fast as i could.  So i opened up maya to basically see what it was about.  I definitely didnt recognize any of the keys or displays that the software had.  Luckily a tutorial guide opened with the program and i went through those, and i actually believe i understand a lot more of maya, just off those brief basic tutorials.  One of the tutorials was on creating primitives, and referring back to the second lecture we had in CS491 we went over nurb vs polygon primitives.  I still wasnt fully understanding these two objects so i searched around on the web for more information.  What i learned was that basically polygon modeling was the basic art of creating 3D models by building  connected polygon surfaces or by manipulating simple polygon based objects called primitives.  And what i learned is that with polygon primitives, the smoother you want your model to be the more polygons you need to add, which probably will add up to a lot and slow down your computer.  I believe this may be why we then use nurb primitives, which basically is a system that uses connecting points to create curbs or splines and connecting splines to create surfaces.  

 N -non

U -uniform

R -rational

B -

S -splines

And using nurb primitives is useful because it requires a lot less detail to create curvy surfaces.

And the tutorial i got this information from is from website is http://podcasts.creativecow.net/mulitmedia-101-podcast/basics-of-nurbs-vs-polygon. 

Another i needed to look into in maya was the use of keyframe controls.  I searched around on the internet for how to use them, but i didnt really find anything and i need to look a little more.  I will be signing on to maya more often now.  I feel a little behind the rest of the class never actually doing any animations, but i hope going through tutorials, and investigating some vocabulary learned in class i can get to the same page as them.