In the first week, our tutor, George, gave us an introduction and outlined what will be covered in Term 1. This term, I will be learning various animation techniques in MAYA, like bouncing ball, overlapping action, weight shifts, walk cycles, and body mechanics.
During the first week, we learned about bouncing ball animation and how to create a more realistic bounce by applying fundamental animation principles such as arc and squash and stretch. Before animating the ball in MAYA, we were instructed to first plan out the animation, including key frames, when the ball makes contact with the ground, and the timing of its speed variations. Planning the animation beforehand is crucial, as it simplifies the process and is considered a best practice. As George emphasized, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”
My planning for the Bouncing Ball.
Once the planning was complete, we were instructed to open MAYA and create a new project by navigating to File > Project Window, naming the project, and selecting a save location. Setting up a new project in MAYA is a good practice for keeping everything clean and organised. We were also advised to save the file in the MAYA ASCII format, as it allows for partial data recovery in case of a file crash.
After creating a new project, I needed to set it up in MAYA by going to File > Set Project, navigating to the project’s folder, and then selecting “Set Project.”
To animate the bouncing ball, we were shown YouTube references of various types of balls and how they bounce. We were then instructed to replicate the bounce of a tennis ball in our animation.
We were instructed not to import the bouncing ball rig directly into the project, but instead to bring it in as a reference. This is done by navigating to File > Reference Editor > Add Reference to import the rig into the workspace.
After importing the rig into the scene as a reference, we learned about two of the twelve principles of animation that would be essential for creating the bouncing ball animation. The two principles covered during the first week’s lecture were:
- Arc – The arc principle in animation emphasizes that objects and characters should move along curved paths, rather than straight lines. This reflects the natural movement of living beings, which typically follow curved trajectories.
- Squash and Stretch – Squash and Stretch is an animation technique that alters the shape of an object or character to convey a sense of flexibility, weight, and impact.
We were introduced to the Graph Editor and instructed to animate the bouncing ball using Spline instead of Block Out. Once the bounce and rotation animations were completed and refined in the Graph Editor, we were introduced to Motion Trail and learned how to adjust it to enhance the animation.
With that, the first week concluded, and we were informed that critiques would begin in the following week to provide feedback on our animations.