#42 - Animation - Animation Techniques 2
For one of the class exercises I have created a short animation of a ball bouncing a couple of times before coming to a stop. By completing this animation I have learned how to use key frames effectively. I did not come across any problems with Maya as far as animating the ball is concerned, however I did have an issue which was because of my own attention span lacking. To match the ball object to the template I would simply use the move, rotate and scale tools to squash the ball in the right direction. After setting every frame, I would re-position the ball before moving the slider up to the next frame, meaning when I went to move the slider it would undo all the changes I had made to the ball. As a result I had to reshape the ball twice for most of the individual frames, except for those where the ball was round.
Once I had matched the ball to the template for each frame, and changed the settings so that the animation would play in real time at 30fps, the animation was running smoothly and looked quite natural. Something I did notice was that when the ball object would change from round to slightly flattened, sometimes I had rotated it the long way around, causing the ball to rotate unnaturally, but this would only be noticeable if the ball had a texture that was not a solid block colour, so I decided to leave it.
Now that the animation was done, I decided to texture the ball using a Lambert, which I made light blue and added a glow effect to, just because why not. I wanted to practice my texturing skills and make the ball look like a bouncy light bulb in the dark. I also turned up the transparency, incandescence, and ambient colour a little bit to make it appear more like a light bulb. I know bouncy glass isn't realistic but oh well.
Once the texture and the animation were ready, I decided now would be a good time to try and render a scene for the first time. This took a whole lot longer than it should have. I created a new camera and positioned it in front of the bouncy ball facing towards it. Because I had created an extra render layer earlier on whilst playing with new tools, whenever I tried to find the rendered video I would just get a black screen for a second. I thought this was an error to do with my render settings and spent a good hour trying to change certain settings and rendering again after every change, and testing each camera I had available, or adding lights in to see if that made the ball visible. It wasn't until the next day that I tried opening the file for the other render layer, i.e. the correct render layer, that I found the file with the bouncy ball properly rendered into a video.
It's not so much a case of what would I have done differently as what I was trying to do differently and failed to do. I made a silly mistake by creating an extra render layer in the first place, something I did while just playing around with random tools I had not used before. If I had not done this I would have found the first rendered file straight away and saved myself and hour or so of aimlessly rendering the scene over and over again. Despite this, I am satisfied with the scene I ended up with, as the camera is positioned fairly well, and the ball is always visible. The glow effect does in fact make it look like a bouncy light bulb.
Once I had matched the ball to the template for each frame, and changed the settings so that the animation would play in real time at 30fps, the animation was running smoothly and looked quite natural. Something I did notice was that when the ball object would change from round to slightly flattened, sometimes I had rotated it the long way around, causing the ball to rotate unnaturally, but this would only be noticeable if the ball had a texture that was not a solid block colour, so I decided to leave it.
Now that the animation was done, I decided to texture the ball using a Lambert, which I made light blue and added a glow effect to, just because why not. I wanted to practice my texturing skills and make the ball look like a bouncy light bulb in the dark. I also turned up the transparency, incandescence, and ambient colour a little bit to make it appear more like a light bulb. I know bouncy glass isn't realistic but oh well.
Once the texture and the animation were ready, I decided now would be a good time to try and render a scene for the first time. This took a whole lot longer than it should have. I created a new camera and positioned it in front of the bouncy ball facing towards it. Because I had created an extra render layer earlier on whilst playing with new tools, whenever I tried to find the rendered video I would just get a black screen for a second. I thought this was an error to do with my render settings and spent a good hour trying to change certain settings and rendering again after every change, and testing each camera I had available, or adding lights in to see if that made the ball visible. It wasn't until the next day that I tried opening the file for the other render layer, i.e. the correct render layer, that I found the file with the bouncy ball properly rendered into a video.
It's not so much a case of what would I have done differently as what I was trying to do differently and failed to do. I made a silly mistake by creating an extra render layer in the first place, something I did while just playing around with random tools I had not used before. If I had not done this I would have found the first rendered file straight away and saved myself and hour or so of aimlessly rendering the scene over and over again. Despite this, I am satisfied with the scene I ended up with, as the camera is positioned fairly well, and the ball is always visible. The glow effect does in fact make it look like a bouncy light bulb.
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