ChiChih's Blog

Category: Animation Fundementals

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3D Computer Animation Fundamentals Animation Fundementals

Week02 Pendulum

Session

  • Reviewing 12 principle of animation
  • Bouncing ball is everywhere: plan your animation with simple circle first, rather than started with complex shape
  • Overlapping actions: follow through, successive breaking of joints, drag (wave principle)

Planning and Animation

Version1: Horizontal movement

I created a simple plan that moves from left to right and then reverses. This straightforward movement helped me understand the basic principles of motion and timing.

When setting the keyframe numbers, I realized that I still need more practice. The timing in my plan was often either too slow or too fast, so I went back and adjusted it accordingly.

Version2: Circular path

To gain a deeper understanding of pendulum overlap, I observed that when the pendulum moves horizontally, the overlapping motion follows the same direction. However, I began to wonder what would happen when it moves vertically.

To explore this, I tried animating it along a circular path and recorded a reference video for further study.

Feedback and Revision

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamentals Animation Fundementals

Week01 Bouncing Ball

Get Started

This is my first time using Maya, so I went through all episodes of “Intro to Maya” on YouTube before I started anything. With the tutorial, I made a silly rocket animation (not going to show it here).

Then I watched the videos provided from the PDF.

Planning

Version 1

Planning is important because it helps you think, rather than rely only on intuition, and it makes the animation feel more realistic.

I followed the bouncing ball tutorial while drawing my plan. As I am using Procreate, I made the sketch animation while planning to make sure that everything is on the right track. This is more like a test one.

Plan version1
Sketch animation version1

Version 2

After my first attempt, I decided to try it on my own, and this is my second version. I was satisfied with the outcome; therefore, I refined it further and used it as the reference plan for the Maya bouncing ball animation.

Plan v2
Drawing order: red → orange → yellow → green
Sketch animation version2

Animation

With the completed plan, I proceeded to Maya and created the animation by following the tutorial.

The result is shown below.

Feedback and Revision

  • Timing is fine, but the spacing needs to be adjusted.
  • The path should form an arc, especially when the ball reaches the highest points.
  • Squash and stretch: only one frame of stretch in this exercise
  • Slow out, then stop.