Animation Skills

I recently learned to animate on Maya. The given task allowed me to practice what I had learned on objects designed for animation. The animations were to demonstrate five key words for Maya: Turntable, pendulum, overlapping pendulum, bouncy balls, and anticipation.

Turntable was pretty simple. I just had to create an object and make the camera rotate around it, using the "turntable" tool, for animating, and set the easing in and out, with the Graph Editor, in a manner that lets the camera turn constantly.

It's pretty dark but It works fine.

Pendulum was quite simply animating the motion of a pendulum. Rather familiar territory for an animator, but this was just standard practice for learning the software. The easing was accomplished using the graph editor.

Overlapping Pendulum was much more advanced, for having to animate both a swinging in an arc motion, and the overlapping action. This meant that as one part of the pendulum swung, so did the others, and taking the laws of physics into account, this meant that, given the nature of the object, the end of the object would move freely and the closer to the main joint the pendulum was, the more stiff it would be.

Bouncy Balls was, again, very much standard for an animator learning new software. I simply had two different coloured balls, one a solid and the other squishy, and I simply had to animated them both bouncing, while taking account their solidity.

Anticipation was there to practice my ability to animate an anticipation motion, which would then lead to a follow-through movement. I took the green ball and made it crash into a wall, stay there, and then finally bounce back.