During week 4 we took on some animation practices on Maya to improve our skills, learn about the techniques and functions, and be prepared to animate for projects in the future.
Source: Week 4 – 3D Animation, Class exercises, Exercise 01 Ball rig, Exercise 02 Forward kinematic and Inverse kinematic animation systems, Exercise 03 Curious character jump, Exercise 04 Blog rig.
First we looked at the ball rig, which we completed in class. We were tasked to animate the ball bouncing off the red wall and create some kind of post-bounce movement afterwards.
I attempted this with the use of the controls on the objects provided, and the graph editor, that guided where my movement was positioned in each axis.
I tried the use of squash and stretch when the ball falls to the ground/off the wall, and when the ball hits a surface. I also added movement on the wall when the ball bounces off it to make it a more engaging scene.
I was given feedback from my tutor during this class. They liked my approach, and pointed out I should keep the ball consistency throughout the whole action. Etc. As the ball fell to the ground, it would be stretched, but as it reached the ground it would return to the normal ball shape, then it would squash onto the floor.
All I need to do to improve for next time is to keep the shape consistency to give it a proper squash/stretch look.
Next we looked at forward kinematic and inverse kinematic animation systems. These are two different processes of object animation displayed as two robotic arms.
Forward kinematic animation is how each object down the chain follows along with what was moved above. So if the shoulder of an arm moves to the side, the elbow down moves along with it.
Inverse kinematic animation is where either the top or the bottom of an object is the main command for movement – the objects from the opposite place will stay in their place. This is like when you move your leg around when standing but your foot stays in one place.
I completed some simple movements of the two robotic arms paying attention to how I used each animation system.
I had a bit of trouble trying to produce a playblast video of the animation. I was following a Youtube video to help set up the settings however it has caused parts of both objects to disappear, and therefore not show up on playblast.
However, I came back to the files after a few days and they seemed to have fixed themselves, so I was able to produce playblast videos for the two animations again. Now they look much better. It was fun working with these objects apart from the difficulty.
Next I looked at the curious character jump rig. I followed my tutors tutorial and animated my character looking around them, then doing the worm move.
I mostly used the dope sheet to help me out with this step by step animation. It allowed me to move around the frames easily.
The controls were also interesting to use as only two were available, it was a challenge to work from the limited movements. However, I managed okay and I’m happy with the outcome.