Ideas?

[alan93]

I currently am learning Maya after being away from it for some time and just wanted everyone's suggestions. I currently use Udemy and random tutorials I find online and my year subscription of Udemy is about up. I basically did all the relevant material so don't think it be worth it to re sub for another year. What would be a good replacement for that? I heard of the gnomun workshop but that is $600 and some a year and never used it. If it helps I mainly want to focus on modeling things like game assets, environments and that kinda thing.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Nothing teaches modelling (or any creative task, really) better than just doing it and figuring out how to model the object yourself. After a year you should understand the workflows of the software well enough that at this point it's mostly just about what techniques to employ to create the thing you intend to make. If you end up in a situation where you don't know how to proceed, ask specific questions on how to do something in places where knowledgeable people hang out.

 

I personally stopped just randomly doing tutorials in most applications that I use for their own sake and instead try to just create something myself. If I run up against a problem or if I know that I want to achieve a specific result but don't know how to go about it, I look for a tutorial that's specific to the problem I'm facing. That way the learning also sticks better with me, since I'm not just trying to cram knowledge into my brain, but actually understand where I went wrong or what understanding I lacked in order to reach the desired outcome.

 

So if you want to make game assets, do that, without needing prompts from someone. Make a gun model. Try importing it into a game engine and look if what you've made would work for the purpose you intended. Make a car model and rig it in the engine. If you want to make assets for games, you need to understand what constraints that puts onto your models.

[alan93]

13 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Nothing teaches modelling (or any creative task, really) better than just doing it and figuring out how to model the object yourself. After a year you should understand the workflows of the software well enough that at this point it's mostly just about what techniques to employ to create the thing you intend to make. If you end up in a situation where you don't know how to proceed, ask specific questions on how to do something in places where knowledgeable people hang out.

 

I personally stopped just randomly doing tutorials in most applications that I use for their own sake and instead try to just create something myself. If I run up against a problem or if I know that I want to achieve a specific result but don't know how to go about it, I look for a tutorial that's specific to the problem I'm facing. That way the learning also sticks better with me, since I'm not just trying to cram knowledge into my brain, but actually understand where I went wrong or what understanding I lacked in order to reach the desired outcome.

 

So if you want to make game assets, do that, without needing prompts from someone. Make a gun model. Try importing it into a game engine and look if what you've made would work for the purpose you intended. Make a car model and rig it in the engine. If you want to make assets for games, you need to understand what constraints that puts onto your models.

Thank you for the advice. I will start trying that approach as well. I get what you are saying, and I also prefer hands on learning. Any suggestions on where a good place would be to ask questions in general if a specific problem comes up?

[podkall]

1 hour ago, alan93 said:

Thank you for the advice. I will start trying that approach as well. I get what you are saying, and I also prefer hands on learning. Any suggestions on where a good place would be to ask questions in general if a specific problem comes up?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Maya/

 

Apart from figuring it out yourself, you could just find tutorials that potentially improve you in certain area, or another.

 

Find tutorials that might use tools you want to learn/be better at.

 

Alternatively, you could find tutorials for things you've done before, but instead of following, you first see if they use same approach for creating stuff, or if they do something different that you might not know, or look forward to learning/refining.