First off: I wish the title of this blog actually indicated that I had some excursion in South America replete with harrowing tales and wonderful discoveries… but this is about software. Yes, of course I am talking about the Behemoth software that is Maya 8.5 and learning to effectively and efficiently model.  I have absolutely no experience with Maya whatsoever but I have to admit that my lessons have been straightforward and sensible to implement. I won’t lie to you: I was worried at first. Online class, complicated program and a bunch of assignments to complete… but everything been straightforward and makes sense.  You just have to learn how to function all over again in a new software environment.

So you begin at the beginning and absolutely never give up, right? Well, I was up late one night pouring over a lesson when my friend Erin, who is devilishly lucky enough to work for Squenix over in Nippon, messaged me and asked about what was going on with my courses and what exactly I was doing with my newly acquired scholarship.  I thought it odd at the time that she wouldn’t know a lot about Maya but not every company uses that particular program and thought she is a great artist she works in translation–not art. Trying to explain exactly what Maya was over messenger was almost as complicated as working in the system itself.

The best way I could explain Maya to her with my current knowledge and examples was to ask her to think of her favorite PlayStation game character–Vagrant Story, FF7, Soul Blade, Tomb Raider, Threads of Fate, etc. The hard edges and blocky construction–those are the basic composition components of Maya. She took a minute because developers have moved so very far away from those basic forms due to increasing capability in ‘this gen’ consoles… but when you first begin to work within Maya the basic character forms begin to make sense.

BUT! Before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s step back a paragraph and look at Tomb Raider. Lara Croft has to be one of the best visible artistic transformations of an iconic character, well, if we’re not counting characters from the 8-bit days. The ‘Lara Revolution’ first came to my attention in an article by a magazine I worked with doing a retrospective about Lara Croft’s character design and her continually enhanced appearance.  It was basically devolved into a discussion of Lara Croft’s anatomy and the polygons required to make it look (I would say here ‘realistic but let’s face it, it’s not and that is a-ok) pleasing to the eye.

It’s an easy concept at heart- the more polygons you have the better an item looks. I think all the different models in the illustration also effectively demonstrate the jump in consoles and the ever-evolving world of video game art–they reuse similar models for the duration of a console’s life for continuity and to save on development time. It’s pretty easy to pick out the similar models, right?

Sure, gorgeous characters, like the latter Lara, built of millions of polygons can be created in the Maya but, alas, older consoles simply could not/cannot render them–along with everything else. Console hardware development that seemingly limits the graphics in video games–I guess that’s why some folks enjoy PC games more than consoles. (Crysis, anyone?) The pressure to come up with a hardware product that is competitive but won’t kill you in cost is extreme. I remember when Microsoft took a financial hit when they produced the Xbox because production costs for a competitive hardware was higher than a competitive price point next to Sony’s PS2. Currently consoles are more expensive than ever and are catching up in appearance to animated feature films. Even though consoles have come a long way, game artists still painstakingly pick and choose what they want to emphasize while balancing the art and design of characters, the world, budget and timeline provided.

So back to Maya… The power of creation is compounded within numerable options and can be pretty freaking complicated. Making characters still uses the basic tenants from older systems; they’ve just become more complex. Just when you think you have a handle on something you find out that when you hit the ‘shift’ button about twenty more options appears for the twelve menus items you have. It’s just an unbelievable amount to learn and the partner of creative construction is efficient composition. You cannot be successful in just one aspect but must marry both abilities in order to become a ‘good’ artist.

Being creative within constraints can be pretty difficult if you’re not used to it. I’m learning. This fact is really hitting home at the halfway point in the course. Apparently Maya is about building from simple forms in a clean manner and then extrapolating the detail from your base without making extraneous and superfluous design decisions. This is challenging for me because I love adding detail. What good is my character design if it cannot function in the world? The engine has to draw in each character–overzealous detailing, flaws and all. Welcome to extra long loading times and errors. There’s nothing worse than a broken game with mucked up processing time and long, boring loading sequences.

All in all, learning Maya has been fascinating because for the first time I can see how games are created–ingenuity, mistakes and everything in between. ‘Maya Basics’ has been educational on so many different levels–concept artwork, the translation into (then) current graphic capability and applicable to everything I have seen in games, ever. It’s completely exhilarating because I worked for the media end and was completely clueless about development. Once I began learning about the development process, the knowledge changed me and I couldn’t go back to pretending it was okay to rate games without having a clue about how they are created. Entertaining or not, games are created on budgets for specific audiences and as such they are not created equal and that includes the art. It’s refreshing and exciting to go back to all the titles I love and see them with new eyes.

So going back to where this all began…

It was pretty gratifying to be able to share with Erin what exactly I thought of my beginning classes and my introduction to Maya. She’s brilliant as a translator, would love to get into video game art and wanted to know more about my classes at Sessions. Who knows? Maybe now she’ll have enough encouragement from me to try a course and attempt to change her career goals at her epic studio. Now if I could only bribe her with something that could eventually land me a job at Square-Enix… hmmm.

I’ll work on that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 7:35 pm and is filed under AJ & Art, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.