I became '3Dstudent' here years ago while I was studying tradition 2d Animation at college. I like to draw but I loved making a fight sequence with two 'provided' fully rigged chars - Shame I cant yet build my own but thats why I'm here. She's not close to finished but my Kunoichi WIP is better than she was yesterday, and thanks to advice from those here she will be beter tommorrow.

I dropped off the Radar for a few years after I left college... as I no longer had access to Maya. And I had a headache from trying to work it out all by myself... I then found a student copy of Maya 2008 on a suspect disk that did the rounds at College. And fell back in love with it. I like to think I'm intelligent but after six months of intense personal study I still felt- and feel today like a complete noob every time I work on something. I couldnt even come to terms with how to Model, and texture, and rig, and animate, and light, and render a SIMPLE scene. I put Maya aside for awhile and fiddled with other things on that disk like Bryce 5, 3ds Max, Mudbox, Zbrush, Poser....

I would like now to firmly echo Miss_Novas advice NOT to do that. New interfaces and slightly different tool sets... Learn one and learn it well and you'll enjoy it alot more.

When I got an E-Mail out of the blue from here about the summer sale my gloomy experience with 3D Animation had 3 point lighting installed.
My advice to someone Brand New or close to, is to purchase the Apache tutorial from here, it's bloody long but I learnt more in the first hour of that tute than I had in all the time I'd wasted prior. (Once I worked out what the "Rwee key" was) - First of many Life altering moments that guys lessons have given me.

Many of the people here make me feel unworthy with the stuff they post... or just mention off hand while giving simple advice in the Newbie forum... but everyone seems to have also felt like they were banging their heads against a wall at times, and they go out of their way to prevent that misery happening to others..

GL fella