The Message- Maya Animation Update

I've pretty much finished my Maya animation, and I'm now in the process of selecting a soundtrack and audio to go with the finished piece. I found that after a lot of work and practice, the Maya program definitely is easy once you know how to do it. You just have to be really persistent and 'grind' in a way. Although I found that Maya tends to crash a lot, so I'd save really often (more often than not) and it's definitely a program that will seem extremely difficult to beginners because of its precise workings.

One problem I had was rendering a walk with my Koya character because you can only render 24 frames each time you do a batch render (I think) and when I went to do the next step, his legs were very jerky and it didn't look convincing at all.

It seems that saving the frame on the IK Handles wasn't working too well. I think the problem was that I deleted the 24th frame, which should be the 1st frame of the next animation and so when I repositioned the IK Handle it wasn't in the same position as the previous walk and so it 'jerks' to the wrong position. I re-rendered this part recently in order to fix it, so I copied and pasted the 24th frame to the first frame in order to ensure that in the next cycle, Koya's foot is in the same space to make the walk more natural.

Another problem was that original walk was far too slow (even when sped up) and made Koya look as if he was floating along, exacerbated by the fact that his body wasn't moving at all, giving him a rigid walk. I also countered this in the re-rendering by moving his tail and having him nod his head slightly as he walks. I also filmed using two cameras instead of just one for a more dynamic effect and as a result, I feel it was much better.