Class 1 Week 6

Hey everyone! It's week 6 and you know what that means!

More Trooper Tips! First of all, congratulations on making it halfway thru the term! Keep on working hard and before you know it we'll be done for this class!

So what's in store for week 6? The Pendulum! This project is really about nailing down the idea of overlapping action.

You'll learn about successive breaking of joints and let me tell you this is a big one! Well ok all of the principles are important. :)

Anh Huynh Has a really great Blog about this week. And here's a great illustration about successive breaking of joints:

Make sure you plan this week! Draw as much as you can to try and nail down that overlapping idea. What I did to really help me visualize the joints was to draw them using different colors. So get out your colored pencils or crayons wooo!

Try your best this week to not make the joints too jerky, or look like they hit an invisible wall. My mentor let me know that this assignment really needed to be “loosey goosey”.

I took the “layering” approach to animation with this project.

--I planned out the path of my pendulum, and then animated just the platform. Hide the joints if it helps you visualize it better.

--I did my best to really nail down the path and the ease ins and outs of the pendulum, tracking my arcs.

--Then I started on the closes joint. I rotated it at key points, and tweaked it from there.

--I copy and pasted the keys from the first joint to each joint, and offset the frames by one frame. This gave me a good starting point to work with, then you'll have to spend lots of time tweaking each joint.

By the way, don't know how to track your arcs?

Click Here and download "AM! Menu" If you haven't already done so. Read the instructions on how to install it.

When in Maya, use the arc tracker tool:

It's the tool on the left next to the red pencil.

To use it:

-Select the object's main control handle

-Click the arc tracker

-Type in your frame range

-Re-scale it to 0.200, that way it's not too big

-click create

Now you have a nice visual image of your object's trajectory.

I hope you learned something this week and good luck on your project!

~Peer Trooper, Bsly