In this week’s session, George taught us some basic knowledge about animating a bouncing ball in Maya and how to refer to the rigged ball file in it after setting up a file project. By following his demonstration, I have finished a rough version in his class to understand the pipeline of keying the ball in spline, and the way to create a quick selection of all the NURBS curves.
There are some knowledge points I found were interesting in the session:
- animation in Maya should be always 24 frames per second, games can be 25 frames per second.
- animation is about 60% of planning, and 40% of doing the work.
- we should keep our animation simple and stupid during practive, as K.I.S.S.
- there are two useful YouTubers for animators, one is called ‘3D Animation Internship., and another one is called ‘Frame by Frame Animation’.
- animation should start with referencing my rigged file, in case there will be changed to the model and the rig.
- curve 1 explanation:
- curve 2 explanation:
- the gizmo in Maya always shows X, Y, and Z directions, meanwhile, they are in red, green and blue.
- when we are animating something, always animate it with x, y, z order.
- work in spline with arc is important for the bouncing ball, and work in blocking for the character animation.
- rotation of the ball after timing and spacing, and then adding squash and stretch in the end.
- never touch the main controller during animating of a rigged object.
- can set quick selection or bottom for keying the ball rigs.
To plan out this week’s prep– plan the animating bouncing ball from left-hand side view in Maya, with 100 frames and 24 frames per second. I downloaded Kinovea and did some research on how to use it, using the references I grabbed online to assist my animating work.
Below is the reference I used for my planning and the demonstration of using Kinovea.
Here is the short bouncing tennis ball I cropped in Kinovea:
I made marks on every low and high point when the tennis ball is reaching in this video to plan out the arc of its movement:
Here are two more videos I learnt before I move onto maya with the graph I made above:
Eventually, here is my final outcome of the bouncing ball referring to the bouncing tennis video above, and my working interface from Maya: