CamelCase

Today’s lesson with Kaf was fast and we covered a lot of stuff. The first was a way to label scene objects in Maya, using medial capitals or CamelCase.

Camel case – Wikipedia

Some systems prefer camelcase with the first letter capitalised, others not. For clarity, this article calls the two alternatives upper camel case (initial upper case letter, also known as Pascal case) and lower camel case (initial lower case letter). Some people and organizations, notably Microsoft, use the term camel case only for lower camel case.

Playing with the tools in Maya helped me understand that I have a lot more to learn before I’ll be able to ‘rig‘ a character. I must learn to use pivot points, groups, controls and constraints. While I understand Kaf may expect us to know the basics of 3.D. animation, the college did not list any experience as being necessary, so I had put off learning anything myself. So for the second half of the lesson, we went back to the basics and I studied using the Maya tutorials from YouTube.

The best Maya tutorials I've found are on the Maya Learning Channel, over on YouTube.

I feel much more positive after the lesson, hoping to use what I’ve learnt to build something, no matter how basic. So Kaf set us a task; to create a beach ball which is ready for animation; which can be squashed and stretched; with ‘keys‘ set. Hopefully, this won’t have me pulling my hair out, hah!