Thanks! I hope I hear from others who had similar beginnings.

Is it because it’s a complicated program? Do I just not like animation? Am I more frustrated with learning the tools? Am I feeling normal beginner feels? Have others felt this way and gone on to love the process? I love learning and challenging myself so I’m not really sure why I’m so frustrated. I had to animate a character jumping across a gap - I spent 4 hours (a lot of it was watching the lesson videos to be fair) on 2 seconds of animation only to realize it still looked off! After some feedback I finally got it to look just right and felt proud but exhausted. The actual animation is fun when I can get to it, but also frustrating in terms of something looking off but not being sure how to fix it. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why something was rendering all black - turns out I had a rogue Directional Light somewhere on my screen. Sometimes my rigs break and I spend an hour or so trying to figure out what I did and how to go back to where I was before. I am 3 weeks in and… I hate it? Is this normal? Maya is so complicated and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the graph editor.

It’s been my dream to animate so I was really excited to learn! It’s my first time working with a 3D program and my first serious foray into animation. Hi everyone! I am taking the Maya Animation Basics workshop at AnimationMentor.

Maya computer animation