Balls falling

Animated Falling Balls

No suprises here. Just falling balls. Pretty self explanatory isn't it? This was a very simple project but it was pretty fun non the less. In this project we were given the task of recording 3 different balls falling and then we had to animate them in Maya based off the videos we took. 

Spread Sheet 

The first thing we did for this project was record 3 balls fall onto the ground and bounce all over the place. These three balls were a golf ball, bowling ball, and tennis ball. After we recorded the balls falling we then went on to possibly the most tedious thing we have done in this class beside fixing the 2d story animations (I still have flashbacks). We had to take these videos into photoshop and mark the frames where the ball hit the ground and where the ball was at its highest for each jump. After we did this we had to enter it into a spread sheet along side the heights of the balls and their jumps. This took FOREVER because of issues with the server. 

Maya

Maya was very simple. All we had to do was create all 3 balls (including bump maps and textures) and animate them. The animation part worked like this: We took the balls and set each key frame equivalent to the frames we marked in Maya. After that we took the height of the balls AT those keyframes and set them so equal. After we did this for each ball we got a picture of a warehouse and set it to the background. 

Conclusion

That was about it for this project. Defiantly more self explanatory then anything else but still good practice. I thought that it came out great for what I have done but I did have to adjust a couple key frames to make it more seamless. 

Snow!

The next animation project was based off of something that we are all very familiar with recently, snow! It was a fun project since everyones end product looked very different. 

Special Snowflakes

The first objective for this project was to create the snowflakes themselves. We did this using a special creation tool with a curve tool. We created a one sided shape with this tool and then mirrored the shape against itself. This then created a segment of the snowflake. After we have the one segment we used a "special rotation" tool that rotated the segment in a circle and thus a snowflake was born. We repeated this 5 more times resulting in 6 individual, different flakes. 

Snowfall!

After we created and grouped the snowflakes we created a basic window model to add some context to the scene. We then had to duplicate the snowflakes to create 18 so the animation could go on for longer. After all of this it was time to animate! We set the frame rate to 24FPS and put the max frames to 240. This, obviously, is 10 seconds long. The next part was very easy. All we had to do was create a key frame where the snowflakes were at the top and at the bottom. I rotated the bottom one to make the snowflakes seem to be randomly spinning.

Conclusion

This was a very fun project because of everyones different snowflakes and personal twist on the project. It was also a lot of fun just creating the snowflakes.