Studio Task 2: Animation Skills

Another fundamental function of Maya is to animate 3D models. The toolset for animation, like the modelling toolset, is very comprehensive and always expanding but once again, there are a few more commonly used tools in the set and it is the aim of this task is begin to develop your understanding of these animation tools and their functionality.

There are five sections to this task.....

1: Turntable -


Using the object we modelled in Maya we then created a turntable from this. This was the most difficult task for me because I couldn't get my head around rendering an image sequence.

2: Pendulum -




Right so I had a little play with the pendulum because it's the one I did first so it was really interesting to see the graph editor effects. I don't think any of them are perfect, I think the most interesting one is the first one that accelerates, even thought the last one is closest to being right, I think the first one has more interesting movement and could be a really heavy pendulum and therefore I like it best.

3: Overlapping Action -


For the overlapping action, It honestly took me several observations of the before and after of this action to see what actually difference it made. And I can see it makes the movement more free and less structured and posed. I actually didn't find it as difficult as I thought I would but the process was heavily walk through'd with Matt. I think it would be difficult to apply this to another object for this reason. But at least I'm starting to gain the basic knowledge.

4: Bouncy Balls -



So I may have got mixed up with which one was a squashy ball and which one was hard, but I renamed them so that they aren't the wrong way round. I found it really easy to manipulate the graph editor once I'd been shown the buttons on the interface. I think it just takes a lot of time to get used to the interface there's always more panels to be introduced to. I think it's difficult for me because once I know what I need to know I don't dedicate time to experiment with the rest of it.

5: Anticipation -



Now I don't think this movement is by any means nearly good enough for the animation but that's why we need to play with Moom in tasks like this to get the movement more elegant. The anticipation is there but I think that this action is very fast and I just couldn't fathom how to slow the stretching at the start down because the graph editor was just so complex.

I think even though this module is all about animating I think my strengths are in Modelling and I actually really want to make myself in a model so I think I'm going to try do that after the crit. I know it makes a lot more work for myself but I think I'd benfit more from it and at least then I'll feel like I'll be able to say, look I did give Maya a fair chance I don't actually hate it and I am actually compatible with it.