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The Art Assignments

The goal of the art assignments is to give you exposure to Maya. The fact that you make some art is actually secondary. It would be nice if you try to make something interesting, but the real goal is to spend some time and figure out how to make Maya do things.

We have a page on how to get started with Maya, that is mainly a pointer to where the documentation lives.

All in all, this needs to be a team effort: there are 19 of you, there is one of it. Please share information and hints with one another. For the assignment itself, I would like you to work with a partner (although for one part, you will each have to create your own pictures).

There are two art assignments:

Art Assignment 1: Make a Picture or Two

Due date: Tuesday, February 5, 2002

Fire up Maya and make a picture. It must be rendered (not a screenshot or play-blast).

At a minimum, your scene must have an in-scene light (that casts visible shadows), at least 3 different types of geometry, and at least 3 different surface types (including using a texture map). Hopefully, you will chose to do more than the minimum. You won't be graded on artistic merit, but trying will give you a chance to experiment with the tools. You may also turn in more than picture.

For each picture turn in a "full size" (say 640x480) version, as well as a thumbnail (60 pixels high) version. Place the images in your web directory (p:/course/cs838-gleicher/public/html/Students/LOGIN). So each person should have (at least) 2 jpeg files in their directories. Name the images LOGIN-X.jpg and LOGIN-X-s.jpg (where LOGIN is of course your login, and X can be a number or a descriptive word).

You should work on this assignment with a partner, although each person should make a picture.

Art Assignment 2: Make an Animation!

Due Date: February 12, 2002

For this assignment, you are to use Maya to make a short and simple animation. The purpose of this assignment is to make sure that you have a full set of tools at your disposal, and to give you some idea as to what animators are up against.

At a minimum, your animation should be 5 seconds long, have at least 2 objects that are moving, and have a camera motion that is "intentional" (e.g. that there's some idea of why its there).

You must also make a character that moves around, and have this character do something. For example, you might try to make a humanoid character and make it walk, or a snake slither, or squirrel climb a tree or ... Try animating this by hand (key framing it). The goal here is for you to appreciate how hard it is to keyframe good motion, not necessarily make a great work of art.

Again, I yope you do more than the minimum, and use this as an opportunity to experience some of the things we discuss in class, particularly keyframing. On the other hand, don't be too ambitious. In 2 weeks, its unlikely that you will be adept enough with the tools to do create Toy Story.

Check back soon for details on the final form of your animation, and what tools we will give your for doing "post-production" (e.g. turning the rendered images into movie files).

For this assignment, you must work with a partner. The pair of you only needs to turn in one animation.

CS838