This served as my introductory session to Friday’s lectures on animation fundamentals as I’d missed the first week of teaching. I was introduced to a set of core principles I want to make a note of here:
- When working in Maya, always save as Maya Ascii format
- Import rigged objects into Maya via the Reference Editor
- Attach all files to project titled Animation Fundamentals, saved to Hard Drive or desktop
- I was added to the Microsoft Teams group where resources are added, including tutorials to work through tests at own speed
We were reminded to buy or borrow a copy of the Animator’s Survival Kit, and to familiarise ourselves with the twelve principles of animation
Then onto the pendulum test:
We used the ultimate rigged pendulum found on Behance via the following link: https://www.behance.net/gallery/17774421/Ultimate-Rigs-for-Free
We were told to create Quick Select Sets for the Pendulum itself, then the joints separately for ease and speed of selection while animating. Quick Select Sets are added via the Create tab > Sets > Quick Select Sets > the set is named, then added to shelf.
First we keyed in the movement from left to right, but Maya automatically gradually slowed the pendulum down as it stopped, when what we wanted was an abrupt stop. To do this, we used the graph editor. Rather than manually editing the curve along the Z axis to straighten it out, we were advised to use the Linear Tangents feature shown here:
Next we rotated the joints in line with the pendulum’s movement along the Z axis to illustrate the sense of gravitational pull, being dragged behind:
After the abrupt stop at frame 40 comes the tricker part, the pendulum joints swing back with the force of the energy with which they were dragged up to this point. They have to be animated snapping back in a way that makes realistic sense in line with the speed at which the pendulum was moving – remembering also that the force will never match what it was before. The pendulum will never swing back higher than it did in the first instance.
At this point in the lesson I was starting to appreciate the fluidity of the pendulum joints’ movement and how they illustrate the sudden force with which the pendulum stops moving, and beginning to get more comfortable with the software and rig we were using.
By the end I was spotting something like a pattern in the graph editor:
But watching the playback I’d clearly rushed through some of the keyframes when they should have been spaced apart more to denote the slow fluidity of the joints as they gradually stopped swinging:
Even a relatively small adjustment in spacing made a difference:
This is how playback looked after cleaning up the keyframes and offsetting the bottom control/joint by 3 frames:
In some ways better, in some ways more uncanny.
After further cleanup:
Finally: