Working With Wonderful Wacoms

It's been another busy week. My biggest achievement was to use a Wacom Tablet! To be honest, I was nervous about it, I've always used a mouse. Basically, Wacom tablet lets you use the Maya software (and any software really) using a pen stylus on a tablet. It completely replaces the mouse. It's weird, you just hover the pen over the tablet and it moves the cursor around your screen. It also has little buttons on your pen, to use the respective middle and right clicks. It's going to take some getting used to, but I'm really excited and have already done some Maya modelling with it! I got my Wacom tablet from Amazon, I'm using the Wacom Bamboo Pen Graphics Tablet from Amazon.co.uk and I'm really pleased with it (it only cost me about £50, bargain!). You can also get Wacom tablets on Amazon.com so it's definitely worth shopping around.

See link for image credit.

I also started modelling heads and modelling furniture this week! Quite a comparison, lol. The head picture on the left is from a design page at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne I'm linking because there are some pretty nifty tutorials on how to model in Maya, so definitely worth taking a peek.

I'm beginning to feel more and more confident about using Maya. It's taken a few weeks, but things are starting to sink in, and some techniques are turning into autopilot in my mind.

As far as travelling to my course goes, I've not had any commutable problems into London, with the Olympics in full swing...which is always a bonus!

Olympic Inspiration

It's been a busy few days since I last posted. I've had birthday celebrations to plan, dinner parties with friends, Olympic Opening Ceremonies for London 2012 to watch (obvs)...and do some Animation homework too.

Getting in and out of London for my course has been pretty crazy. On Thursday, I left Oxford at 3:30pm and didn't arrive until 6:30pm (the course starts at 7pm). Usually, the journey takes just over an hour, but because of the Olympics, London has gone into some weird traffic meltdown. Thursday was the eve of the Opening Ceremony, so there was a concert and all sorts of other goings on, making traffic even worse than it normally would when the Olympics is in full swing...grrrrreat!

Image credit:E! online 

So, who saw the opening ceremony? Wasn't it amazing? I mean breath takingly stunning. Danny Boyle did a great job. The lighting of the cauldron was a triumph (although it did feel a bit Harry Potteresque, with the 7 chosen teens, all lighting the goblet of fire together, I mean the bronze-petal-trumpets-cauldron), so creative and symbolic.

The whole event was very inspiring and got me thinking of lots of animation ideas. It's always good to be visually stimulated when working in a creative industry - and the London2012 opening ceremony was one hell of an inspiration. Wish I was there. Amazing.