Animation I - Motion
Now we really begin to move.
(Okay, okay. I'll try to stop with the bad puns.)
Basic motion! The assignment here was to play with some bouncing balls. We had to try to make three balls
bounce around as realistically as possible, using light, medium, and heavy weight balls in real life
as reference. We had to do this in a few different ways, from explicit keyframing to paths and so on.
I ... um ... creatively interpreted the assignment. For one thing, I only had a lightweight and heavyweight
ball as reference, so I just interpolated data points to make the mediumweight. This, of course, caused
my professor to sigh and morosely mutter something about Computer Science majors. We're not that bad, are
we? :)
So here's what we have:
Note
All videos
are saved as MPEG files between three and five seconds in length. Each video is about 530KB at the
most. |
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Keyframed Bouncing
Combining the "bounce in place" and the "keyframed forward motion" parts of the assignment together,
I did this. Keyframed bouncing around a small platform.
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Path Animation I - paths hidden
After spending so much time tweaking the vertical motion in the last "bounce" there weren't ain't no
way I wuz gonna replace it with a path. So, I used paths only for the horizontal motion here and
edited my keyframes a little on the vertical. I'm very proud of making two balls hit each other,
one gaining energy and one loosing energy.
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Path Animation II - paths visible
This is the same as the last, except I put in some geometry to show what the paths were. The little
glowy dots are like the shadows of each of the balls, travelling the same paths at the same timing
but without the vertical motion.
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Zig-Zag
She wanted us to bounce a ball in a zig-zag pattern. I characterized this and made
the little sphere play on a playground. This was another creative interpretation, as extra
geometry (like shading and texturing) was forbidden in the assignment. I think it looks good.
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Character
The last part was to add some sort of change in direction to the little guy, and make him seem
more a person than a lump of shiney rubber. The medium-weight ball I had been using here
got kinda spooked when I told it this, and it tried to run away.
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About the only part of these I'm really unhappy with is that I realized at the end why I was
having problems getting the characterized versions to "lean forward" when they squashed and
stretched. It was a very simple thing, really, but by that point deadlines were about on
me and the urge to finish was a little stronger than the urge for perfection.
The videos above represent about 10 drat-hours of work, if you wondered. That is not counting the
little glowing blotches on the path animation, which I added later.
Lighting - / - Top Level - \ - Character
