Week 4: Exercise 1

Here's a screenshot of my rendered cube lit with the 3-point light effects:

Making this was fairly straightforward, although I had difficulty understanding about saving scripts and using them in the future by saving the script on the shelf. Nonetheless, I was able to catch on and did it.

Following that, here's a playblast of the barrels falling using gravity. Quality was reduced as the server keeps insisting on rejecting the original file:

I'll be honest; I didn't know that such a thing is possible to do in Maya. I always thought that such effects are accomplished through actual animating. Now I can see how gravity effects are produced in most video games, well, assuming that animation was not already used to accomplish such effects. Not to mention how quick and simple it is to achieve this and that is installed or built-in MEL scripts.

And finally, here's the video of my pyramid rolling around with help from a custom UI. Note that since animating it rolling even with the UI is nigh impossible, I resorted to using FRAPS to record the pyramid rolling:

Creating a window using MEL scripting is deceptively hard due to the large number of codes involved and from the fact that I am new to MEL scripting. However, after going through the lesson, I realize it has several similarities with ActionScript and after a while, it came naturally to me.

I did, however, had a bit of problem rolling the pyramid. When I moved the pyramid, it did not roll and had me stress out for a while. But, I came to realize that I did not read an important part of the lesson: The frame must be greater than 1 for the effect to take place...and my frame was set at 1. I literally slapped myself in the forehead for being stupid and lazy. Hence, lesson learned. Fixed it and I sighed with relief. What an interesting moment it was.