Study Task 2 and playing with simulations

This weeks study task consisted of some basic 101 animation practicals. Working with the graph editor and understanding the Maya universe.

For the bouncing balls I decided I wanted 2 completely different animations. The red one represents something close to a bowling ball dropping to the ground (minus the rolling away), while the green ball represents something more of a big rubber ball? Since I already animated bouncing balls last year at AKV StJoost, this was doing it again, but hopefully better than a year ago.

The pendulum was quite an easy task. The only difficulty I encountered was my spacing (I wanted to create a gradient decrease in the amplitude, but I think the spacing might still be off at certain points.

I loved the segmented pendulum. Really an easy concept. Only difficulty I encountered was the timing of the overlapping action; what kind of delay fits with the speed assigned to the object? That was the only thing that was a bit of a puzzle for me.

Since I think my jumping can be done better, I wanted to try combine the anticipation exercise with jumping again (this time without reference: bad Danique. Next time use reference because it still looks terrible!) The anticipation part of the jump was quite easily done, nothing difficult going on here (except maybe the one stiff arm movement here and there) but with the jump a few things didn't really go according to plan. For some reason the body doesn't stay at the same Z position when going down, meaning the feet always end op behind their starting position. During this exercise I saw again how rusty my 3D animation is when it doesn't concern basic movements or loops. Better create excellent reference as a guide for my final animation.

Reading through some Maya Manuals I encountered the Active and passive rigid bodies. So I wanted to try that out for a minute, with just simple balls falling down. For some reason I still managed to mess up something this simple. I created too many fields and my gravity field was way off! I think I made some mistakes with creating the bodies and the fields because the balls fall down rather slowly for my liking, not really according the law of gravity... Might take another look at this. Fields are rather interesting with creating winds and such, it's nice to know the basics.