Initial issues
While using Maya i have encountered a wealth of issues that consist of bone weights not being applied and the application crashing on multiple occasions and deleting all my animation data.
Issue 1 Bone weights
On a few occasions when i went to edit the bone weights when applying the weight at 100% Value, it would not apply it to the models skin as if it wasn’t connected. Meaning that i would have to restart the program to have it work properly. This wasn’t a huge deal but it meant i would have to spend more time on something leading me to get a bit frustrated at the program.
Issue 2 Corruption of files
I had an issue where my files would get corrupted for seemingly no reason. it took me ages to finally figure out something relatively stable. The issue i believe was a few N-gons not being able to animate properly on the model and once the session was over and i closed the program it would corrupt the program leaving me with no animation data i could use.
I made a stable fix to this 2 weeks before the deadline, by fully Retopologising the T-rex in Blender using retopoflow-3 and then bringing it over to Maya using the FBX format. This was done so i knew there was no N-gons and if there were i knew exactly where they were. I noticed the weird N-gons issues when uploading my file to Sketch-fab and some of the vertex points not moving how they should.
Whilst this was happening i spoke to my teacher about the issues i had and made the decision to make a bunch of animations in the Blender program as a back-up in case i couldn’t get the Maya file to work. This is why i have a wealth of animations on both programs.
The old unoptimized model:
New Optimised model:
I made sure to add some extra loop cuts on the knees to make the animation bones look a slight bit less weird.
What i have learned
I have learned that i shouldn’t use a high poly model for animation, not just because it would slow down the framerate while trying to animate and making the weight painting harder, but because if you miss a few N-gons it could corrupt your files. I will be using a retopologised model for most my animations in the future.
I have also learned that maya is a lot more picky when it comes to bad models and animations. For example it would crash every time i made an animation but it would work fine in blender. Meaning i have to be sure it has good Topology before i start the animation progress.