Maya Animation

For this exercise we had to animate three bouncing balls, a soccer ball, a ping pong ball, and a bowling ball. This gave us a chance to really explore different weights and how this affects the way in which you animate an object. So first off I started with the soccer ball, which has a medium weight, is quite soft and tends to bounce. So I need the ball to fall to the ground at a medium speed, bounce a few times as it gradually settles. I also wanted the ball to feel natural as it landed and took off so used the squash and stretch method to achieve this. When looking back on the animation, I am quite happy with how it looks, the only thing I would pay more attention to would be the ending as I think the ball may need to slow down a bit more, before it comes to a stop.



The next ball I went to animate was the bowling ball. Now this is obviously a very heavy ball so would fall to the ground quite fast and as it is very solid and heavy there would not be much of a bounce. The ball would hit the ground at some force and since it’s too heavy to bounce I decided to carry that force into the ball rolling off to one side. So I decided to use hardly any squash and stretch and only a small bounce as the ball hit the floor. Looking back at the finished piece I am happy with how heavy the ball feels, again the only thing I think need more attention would be the speed at which the ball rolls off to the side. I think it needs to slow down more before it comes to a stop and it may also be going at too high of a speed to begin with.




And last off was the ping pong ball. Now this is the lightest ball of the three, and tends to bounce a lot when you drop it. So when the ping pong ball landed I wanted it to bounce quite high because it is so light and bounce quite a few times before it came to a stop. I dint want to use too much stretch and squash either as the ball is quite airy and doesn’t seem to have much of a impact when it hits the ground. So when watching the animation there are a few things I would change. First off the ball seems to bounce a bit too fast for a ping pong ball and secondly the ball needs to slow down a lot more at the top of its arcs as it looks like it’s going the same speed through out.



The ball project on a whole was a good and helpful when trying to get to grips with animation in Maya, or any animation. It is especially good when trying to understand the graph editor, which is so helpful when animating in Maya.


Ok on I next project we had a choice, and I chose to animate a human character picking up a heavy box and placing it on a table. I really liked the idea of this animation and really wanted to give some character to it. I decide to have my character start off looking down at the box and then stretch out as she got ready to pick up the box. She would then step forward to the box, spread out her legs a bit as she got ready to pick up the heavy box. She would then crouch down to the box, stabling herself has she went and then start to pull the box towards her so she could get a good grip on the box. She would then slowly lift the box up bending her head back and having her arms stretch slightly to show how heavy the box is. Once standing, but still slightly crouched as the box is heavy, she would stumble over to the table. As she came towards the table she needed to lift the box up high and push it onto the table. Then take a moment to rest and wipe her brow. Sounds simply enough, well I did have a few problems. First the rigged model I had to work with did not have any type of clamp on the hands which meant every time I moved her body her hand would move into the wrong position, which did make it quite difficult to keep the hand stable. Next problem was there was no way to rotate her arm from the shoulder. The rig gave you the option of moving the hand with an ik handle but would not let me rotate her joints. So this again made it even harder to keep the arm stable especially when she was stretching her arms out. When watching the final animation back I can say that I’m that happy with it. There are places where the arms are twitching a bit and the stretch just looks really robotic. The hands aren’t animated that well and need more attention. I also needed to have a few pauses in there like when she first puts the box down. I think the point where she lifts the box up and takes it over to the table looks quite good and I’m happy with how heavy the box feels but I think the way in which she puts the box down seems a bit too light and robotic, there also needs to be some more anticipation before she picks up the box. Some of the poses at in the animation could also be a bit better and do make the animation fell less dynamic especially at the end, and the legs don’t look quite right which need to be fixed, but over all I think I did ok but it could be a lot better. I did enjoy the exercise as I am really interested in doing 3d animation and definitely want to do a lot more in the future.