Maya for Beginners
Complete Guide to 3D Animation in Maya

Following with interest…

I’m 32 and been learning Maya for about 3 months, but I was using Cinema4D before that for over a year. I’ve been learning online in a non classroom environment, which has been good for me, but isn’t for everyone.

Personally I have mainly found that it’s very difficult to compare yourself to others when you have limited contact with people at the same level - outside of places like Reddit I mean - and therefore get a sense of how capable you are. For this reason, among others, I am also considering a course with real people - potentially even an MA

This might be useful, I would recommend it if you just wanted to have a go without spending too much:

Maya udemy course

If it's animation you want to learn, you could skip game design for now and just look at animation. This seems pretty good to me and it's ridiculously cheap. Once you have a grasp on that, you can return try out getting the animation into Unity and figure out how that's different. Then School of Game Design could be a nice option.

Blueprint is much faster lacks features what you can't do on Cpp such as the ability to make your own classes or creating your own blueprints. You can even broadcast blueprint such as adding an animation to open a door, sound effects (good for firing a weapon), and networking using STEAM Online Subsystem.

I'm neither an expert on my field I'm only limited to what I know based on my UE4 experience. What all I know about Blueprint is that it can make things "smoother" for example opening a door in Cpp I just do a simple if(){open;}else{close;} what it will look like in-game would just be fast and un-interesting. So I turned to Blueprint to make the door open on timeline so it looks like the door is opening "naturally" in-game.

Attempt this:

1. Get up
2. Open and close your room door

Most of the time the door swings naturally smooth if you only have Cpp to tell the door to open it would just automatically open unnaturally. In Blueprint you can put a timeline on that door, make it swing slowly, and smoother as you would open it naturally in real life scenario.

Here's another example I use Cpp to create classes for everything in my game. Such as opening. The key things I need to put on my game is this:

1. How would it open?
2. Does it require a key?
3. What is the method?
4. How do I attempt the door once I have the key?

I would write a class for the door mesh, create a grabber component for my pawn, create a voxels "trigger volume" that triggers to open Open_Door(); including Close_Door(); function, TArray that looks for the following object class (the key), and if player has the key and triggers the voxel "trigger volume" it opens the door. I know it seems complicated this is the best way for me to summarized what can Cpp and Blueprint can do if used together. And this is what I have learned in the past that I'm also continuing to use as it's the only thing I know how to do for Unreal Engine 4 with the exception of UE4 + Cpp Network is a whole another complicated world.

This subreddit's side-bar should have the instruction for paid and free services I highly recommend looking that Udemy section. Learn the multiplayer tutorial first as it covers basic principle then get into 3D Modelling, animating, and UV mapping either Maya or Blender. --->

I chose Maya so if you're interested this is what I'm currently studying.

https://www.udemy.com/course/autodesk-maya-3d-animation-course/

This course of udemy, I cannot recommend enough. If you don't have a udemy account already you should get it for 10 quid, if not they almost always have a sale on so just keep checking back.

I just started this course, they had a big sale for 7/4. I like it so far, I’m a total beginner though. I bought two courses actually so I should be busy for a while. Looks like they have another sale going for first-time students.

https://www.udemy.com/course/autodesk-maya-3d-animation-course/

Learn Unity 3D for Absolute Beginners | Udemy

Maya for Beginners: Complete Guide to 3D Animation in Maya | Udemy

https://www.udemy.com/course/autodesk-maya-3d-animation-course/ do you think that is a good course to learn maya?

Learning resources that I've found quite useful-

1. https://www.udemy.com/course/autodesk-maya-3d-animation-course/ I started with this course. This is a beginner course but covers a lot of information about Maya and the basic principles of animation. The instructor is quite knowledgeable and understands that most of the students taking the course are beginners.

2. The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams

3. feedbacks/suggestions that I got from the internet.

This is should be a perfect example how a basic game should look like when you start out.

YouTube Video| ----| Sample Project|

Right now I'm focusing more on the 3D modelling and animating aspect on my project also one more thing have a goal in mind. For this project goal I plan on making a bedroom the room your seeing isn't part of the project it's a test sample I'm working on testing different collision mesh I can do on Maya. Like I said you don't have to use Maya because Blender offers the same thing just different software and if you asked me for help on Blender don't bother I won't be a use, but that community is pretty big than Maya's so asking for help on there will not be a problem. Start small learn some important core minimal on Unity maybe you'll learn how to make your first door class that you can interact by pressing a key or placing objects into trigger volumes and do some complex puzzle for the door class.

The list of Udemy tutorial I took to get this knowledge:

1. https://www.udemy.com/course/autodesk-maya-3d-animation-course/

2. https://www.udemy.com/course/3d-modeling-for-video-games-beginners-guide/

3. https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse/ <--- He offers Unity as well

Wait for discounted price in a few weeks or so.