Animation 101: week 11: 8/12/17: @00491819: Alexander Montgomery: University of Salford: Animation in Maya- Beach ball and pendulum remake.

Description:

In the break and remainder of Animation 101 I took the time to work on and refine some Maya animations and even remake them to see if I could get a better result. The animations in question were the beach ball bounce exercise and the pendulum. I worked on the beach ball animation first using the reference video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaPpzdVzSFs along with the bar sheet that I had done for this particular task and this time using what I’d learned and been shown in these sessions I would get it done correctly. In analysing the reference video I took note of about eight bounces in total for the air filled ball and much like the bowling ball it was a slower bounce and took less time to stop. I communicated the beach balls size in the sphere polygon to show the realism in the ball size and weight as was recommended to me last week by Joe and Johnny. The key frames were then communicated through the bar sheet but made sure to look at a horizontal angle to make sure that I wasn’t hitting through the grid. 

Bar sheet.

Graph editor near final.

For the bounces I played the film back and made sure that I didn’t miss out or misplace anything, and upon completion I went into the graph editor to alter the nodes and positions of the frames. Learning from the bowling ball exercise I knew that the arcs and sharp bounces were the key in this exercise. Therefore using the tools in the graph editor I sharpened the bounces and slightly widened the arcs whilst referencing back to the video and playing back the animation to make sure it was right. Upon seeing the animation play the second time I felt that it was close to perfection and even James looked at it and saw that I was on the right track in the beach ball exercise and the only refinement required was the speed of the last few frames. These were placed closer together via the selection tool and made the animation smoother. However upon playing the film back I noticed that the beginning bounce wasn’t touching the grid despite the bounces being set to the same measurement of 1.779 I corrected this by ever so carefully moving the node down slightly. This corrected the error very well and was more even with the rest of the piece.

Animation

The pendulum was an animation that I did struggle with in both Maya and stop motion so to aid me I decided to research from the animation survival guide particularly the guide to the pendulum swing so I found the reference image of the swing from the guide on google and communicated this idea into a bar sheet for stop motion and Maya.  This was then translated into Maya by moving the pivot point from the cube into the centre of the grid using the “D” key to separate and snap the pivot point into place. When I started there was an issue with the rotating of the pendulum as the cube was pointed down instead of going across so I started from scratch. Through this I used the pendulum guide on black board and the bar sheet as a guide for positioning much like my past few attempts. 

Bar sheets

Upon completion I went to the graph editor to apply some alterations to the nodes and to try an experiment. 

Graph editor pre edited

Graph editor altered.

The idea was that I would see if the skills and tools of the ball bounces could be transferable to the other animations, I began with widening the swinging and stopping nodes making them slightly closer together as I thought it could stabilize the speed and travel of the pendulum. Whilst I thought it would it didn’t deliver a desired effect as it did sometimes swing out of sync with the rest of the animation. I looked over it a few times until I felt that I was satisfied with the end result but the real challenge would be in doing the stop motion version later in the afternoon. 

Feelings:

Whilst doing these exercises at first I was feeling confident that this time I could finally produce a clean ball bouncing and pendulum animation with new knowledge that I’d gained over the last few weeks and not have to redo them. When James told me that I was on the right track with the beach ball exercise I was feeling amazed that for once in these exercises I was getting the bouncing and timing correct and not getting concerned about what the feedback would be. In the pendulum animation I was slightly nervous as this was one of the animations in this course that I found to be the most difficult aside from the bouncing ball exercises. Progressing with the animation and trying to figure out the graph editor for this animation I was feeling creative with the idea of using the feedback and advice with the ball bouncing exercises in the hope of improvement. 

Upon completing the exercises I was feeling both relieved and hopeful at the same time in that I had finally produced some animations that I may consider submitting for my final pieces on the 12^th January 2018. 

Evaluation:

Looking back on the two animations it is clear that I took some good and creative approaches such as using the bar sheets to work out the two animations and then communicate them within the Maya software. I possibly would’ve looked at a reference video of the pendulum to try and see if I could be more accurate with the animation and the positions of the ball. I think that showing the onion skins on the bar sheet helped very well in terms of the pendulum motions and to best determine the holding position. However the real test would be in doing the pendulum in stop motion to see if it worked. 

Analysis:

Looking in terms of the bar sheets I could finally see the benefits of using them as up until the last few days I couldn’t understand how they worked or how to use them. In this session however I could see that my work was running a lot smoother with the use of this tool and that things were getting more on track. In terms of using the ball bouncing graph editor feedback on the pendulum, I was seeing how using new learned knowledge in Maya helped to look back and refine our animations further to make a more refined outcome. 

Conclusion:

In conclusion I would think that I had done very well on the beach ball animation and that it had to be one of the only ball bouncing exercises that I may’ve ever gotten right on the first try it was a bit of a surprise to say the least. However in terms of the pendulum I wasn’t sure about its outcome in Maya and was even more concerned about its effectiveness in doing this in stop motion but I must persist and try to get a more refined result. This was the point of the exercises to try and attempt them and if we wanted to we could go back and revisit them. 

Action Plan:

On the events of today I would possibly in future ask for advice for remakes such as the pendulum to see how I could refine and make it better for a possible submission for my module work. In addition I would possibly ask about any possible approaches to the ending swing to either add some last few swings or to just halt the swing in the last frame of the animation to see if I could achieve a more desired outcome.