Autodesk Maya
At the start of the year, Maya was one of the things that I was dreading the most as I had no prior knowledge or experience with it. While I did (and still do) find it fairly difficult from time to time, it was nowhere near as bad as I'd expected.
I've learned to deal with the problems that it throws at me every now and again by revisiting what I've made and trying again, as if something stops working, there's more likely than not always going to be a fix for it. Learning different shortcuts and other tips that help make the process less frustrating (like deleting history, centering pivots and freezing transformations) was also very useful. Another thing I've learned is to save incredibly often due to the amount of crashing that I've had to deal with over the past year so whenever it does happen, the work I end up losing is very minimal.
I think the part of Maya which I enjoyed the most has probably been animating and modelling (even though I have found the latter to be very frustrating at times!). One of the things I struggle most with, however, was rigging so I intend to revisit some of the tutorials over the summer and try and improve my skills before moving into the second year.
Life Drawing
As I'd done a couple of life drawing lessons before, I had some idea of what to expect already when it came to experimenting with different materials and time limits on different positions that the model would hold.
I do think that I have improved throughout the year (particularly after the December session) and it's helped me get better at proportions, how the body works in motion and working quickly on paper. I found the sessions to be entertaining and even somewhat therapeutic at times as they were perhaps the least stressful part of Toolkit. It's helped my confidence grow a little bit in terms of getting proportions and anatomy right.
I do think that I'll work hard to use colour more often in the second year and break out of my comfort zone even more as well as trying to experiment with more abstract methods in my work. I'll also work on drawing faces and hands more, as they're my two least favourite things to draw during life drawing sessions as I find it quite difficult to get them down quickly - so I'll be working on trying to draw even faster as well! Overall, I'm really looking forward to having more sessions in second year.
Animation
Overall, I think that the animation workshops is where I managed to improve the most; at the start of the year, I struggled with the basics of animation and understanding what goes where and how secondary movements work with primary ones. Towards the end of the year, however, I ended up learning how to do proper squash and stretch and character movement, mostly when doing the flour sack animation.
I was surprised how much I actually ended up loving 2D animation by the end of the year as it grew on me quite a bit and I got to understand it a lot better. It's made me appreciate it a lot more and I think I'll try and revisit Animate and 2D animation in general during the summer as I find it to be enjoyable despite the amount of effort that's needed to go into it - I found out that the end results often pay off massively. Another achievement I made is that I also finally began to understand how overshoot works and how it helps the animation 'pop' more.
I think if I were to try and improve further, I'd go back and redo some of the earlier animations in the year as I feel, as said previously, that I understand a lot more now and think I could make them look a lot better.
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