Some VFX/animation nerdery: while digging through my file archive today I came across an interesting artifact: the very first animated short ever created using Maya. I know it’s the first one, because it was created by a small group of Maya developers in 1997, months before version 1.0 was released, to test the software. We were tired of testing individual features in isolation and wanted to actually make something fun.
The most notable feature of the animation is how absolutely terrible it is. None of us were animators, so all the key framing is awkward and the camera motion robotic and all the materials flat. But it had a story (we even storyboarded it) and it was a blast to make. And it did help us a find and fix a bunch of integration bugs.
The only software I have that can actually play my 27-year-old video file is VLC (because it can play anything!)
(I don’t want to give the impression that we weren’t also working with pro animators and VFX artists — we absolutely were, daily, and they were also testing the software. But this was the first completed short.)
#VFX #animation #Maya
