Practicing in Maya the past week

Started again with the Mery rig. Tried another attempt at animating a walk cycle. This time with a pose to pose technique. (and I forgot to screen cap it, dammit, pay attention!) 

I kept receiving warnings like these one below, at first I thought things weren't working the way I wanted them to (create cycles of the graphs in the graph editor.) Turned out, there was actually nothing wrong.

Thanks to the tips I got from Mat the 10th I got better use out of the tools in this rig and the pose to pose animation went a lot smoother this time. If I put a bit more work into the second walk cycle I think it could've been even more better than the first time. I lost interest after a while because of the many warnings and rushed to finish it. Maybe I should grab another rig next time and create something more cartoony to step out of my comfort zone.

I also finished my attempt at the model of a realistic head. I stumbled upon some minor problems because the photos weren't perfectly aligned, but I think I made quite an okay job. The tutorial I followed was very helpful. The guy explained everything he did, not too fast and kept explaining why he did certain things. Problem was dat he never uploaded his tutorial on modelling the neck of a head, so when I was nearly there, I didn't know what to do. 

Lucky for me I found another tutorial that perfectly went on where the other guy had left off. 

After giving it a few days rest I tried to make a decent UV map (Not that I'm necessarily going to texture this head, but more for the sake of practicing unwrapping UVs.) Watching a few tutorials I found out that a lot of people have certain ways to unwrap it. I followed the tutorial I found had an easy way to do it mostly manually (because never trust technology to do it himself) so that I can use this technique in many different ways and not only the head.

Looking back at the mapping, I think I could've manually tweaked certain UV points, but it's fair to say it doesn't look too bad. I certainly know now how to properly unwrap them now for future reference.