Study Task 2 - Animation Skills Pt 1

So these took a little longer than expected to finish… I wasted a couple of days trying to find some proper tutorials and examples to check back on, and finally, it was today that I found this, anyway, here are my exercises, they aren't perfect but at least I gave it a try (And you know yada yada I will hopefully get better as I go along):

Turntable

After choosing your desired camera view, go to the view menu and select Create Camera from View, after that, go to the Animate Menu and select the little square to the right of Turntable, to check your direction (Clockwise or anti-clockwise) and number of frames this 360 degree rotation will last for. And there you go.

One thing I keep forgetting is that a turntable animation is actually the animation of the camera and not the object itself, and so several times when I was trying to adjust the speed of its rotation in the graph editor, I instead kept selecting the prop, hoping a graph of any sort would show up. Anyway, to change the speed of the rotation to a constant one, I simply selected the entire thing and changed it into a straight line.

Pendulum

This is where the graph editor gets more involved…

We were fortunate enough to be given a pre-prepared scene file, as all we have to do is to change the rotation values of the pendulum. At the moment, the speed of this pendulum's movement is still too constant, so you know what w-I have to do…

After messing around with the graph editor by stretching the curves a little more and curving the tangents (It's also here that I managed to remember how to use the pre and post infinity tools! Curves>Pre/Post Infinity>Cycle), we get something a little better than before:

Overlapping Action

Apparently this one was already made all ready for us, all we needed to do was rotate it, though I was still able to mess it up this one time… but nothing deleting all the keyframes and starting all over can't fix!

I wasn't sure if the top of the pendulum was allowed to swing along with the rest, and so I made two versions, one with a still top and another that moves along with the pendulum (This meant that I also had to save two scene files for this exercise):

Bouncy Balls

So I started out by putting the two balls into separating layers, so that I wouldn't get distracted and attempt to animate both of them together… after that, I decided to start with the solid ball.

Solid Ball

So a solid (Or ceramic) ball couldn't possibly squash and stretch considering the material it is made out of, nor can it bounce back up as high as the height it is dropped from, and so that was the main focus, to create a realistic enough landing animation for the red ball.

It was pretty tough figuring how to get it to dribble a few times after its first landing, I soon realise that adjusting it was much easier by first giving it a basic bounce, before adjusting the height, speed and acceleration in the graph editor.

Rubber Ball

I believe that this one was a little easier, I just needed to show how the rubber ball changes in shape as it bounces up and down, in the end I had to insert in two squash deformers, one at the bottom when it squashes, and another in the centre as it stretches, the centre deformer required some adjustments to the high and low bound values.

After chatting with my lecturer however, this appear to just be one of many techniques in animating a bouncing ball, a deformer can actually be inserted directly into the object, unlike the way I placed it, I shall look further into this during future exercises.

So we start off the same way with this ball like we did with the solid one.

The tangents at the bottom are then sharpened so that the ball will immediately
bounce back up.

Before playblasting the final video, I was having issues in removing the wireframe that covered the red ball, while it won't show in renders, it definitely still does in play blast animations. What I needed to do to remove it however was to select the object, go to Display>Polygons>Custom Polygon Display, and just set everything to 0.

I know it could still be done better, I will most definitely improve as I go along.

Anticipation

Why did I save the toughest one for last?

So I had initially tried to use Moom for this exercise, and everything was fine (Though a tad tedious) until I reached the jumping bit.

If I had more time, I might have tried to figure out what it was that I did wrong (Maybe he doesn't need to jump that high? That's why he still stays somewhat rooted to the ground? I'm sure Matt can help me out later on)  but as I don't have much time and needed to move onto the rest of my ever-growing workload this year, I decided to switch to a ball animation instead, and even that proved to be a pain in the aft for me… Thankfully I found this tutorial.

Apparently I had to key select a number of frames to keep the ball in place (It would always drift off if I didn't). Anyway let's just pretend that this is an animated orange as I really was more focused on animating the anticipation bit than anything else.