Maya: Model Evaluation

Maya is difficult for beginners to grasp at first. Even the navigation itself is quite confusing, to begin with. I find myself flying around Maya quite naturally now, however, if I switch to Unreal after using Maya it becomes extremely difficult to navigate around Unreal naturally. The first week of using it was primarily getting used to it, and once I got past that stage and was familiar with the basic tools, I started to feel far more confident and begun enjoying it. I have come to realise that many tools in Maya are quite unreliable and 'buggy', which makes it confusing as a beginner to know which tools to use, and which ones to avoid - or which ones to use in certain situations.

Once I began getting into the model, I had to discover the hard way to ensure the model is as clean as possible. I restarted my model because of it becoming deformed every time I tried to progress any part of it, this was because I did everything on one object and did not keep the edges and vertices clean and organised.  

From using Maya, I have learned about a small range of tools, but mostly getting used to Maya in general, the interfaces, options and the importance of being organised and clean has been a focus for me, oppose to learning a huge range of tools. I think it is extremely important to get into good habits and keep your model clean and professional from the beginning. I found myself restarting my model twice because I had not kept it as clean as I could, which resulted in huge problems later on, that it was actually easier for me to start again. 

If I were to restart the project, I would start much earlier and devoted more time to learning the ropes by following online tutorial series. By jumping into the project, even though I made mistakes and had to restart, it was a valuable lesson learned and perhaps better I did jump in and learn the hard way. In the future, I would attempt a practice model which has little to no detail and work my way up in difficulty. In hindsight, I should have taken the time to search up about the most popular tools that are used by the professionals, and tried to learn a few key ones that may have made my project far more efficient. I spent too much time making my own mistakes and learning the difficult way, rather than taking more time to learn from the best and avoid the mistakes they have already made.