Starting out with Maya

Over the last few days I've been doing the built-in tutorials of Maya to get to grips with the interface and a few of the basic tools needed to create things. By the end of the last tutorial I had a textured ball with a simple bounce animation, lit up by a spot light. Heres a screenshot of it:




 


This is required as part of a course I've been doing at university for over a year now which teaches you in the way of how the games industry works, the tools they use to create games and most importantly, how to put your creativity to use by way creating media assets that can be used in a game, or the design process of a game.

I'm hoping to become a computer games programmer once I've finished the course (maybe even before, who knows), but at the same time, gain an understanding of how each of the other stages in creating a game are generally performed. For example, the concept art and design, audio creation, 3D modelling, animation, narrative, testing and more.