Thursday 27th February 2013

Basic Animation

Today I learned about basic animation within Maya as well as how to animate the camera. For my basic animation I made a simple bouncing ball animation along with a camera rotating around. Creating this animation wasn't particularly challenging as all I was doing was adding keyframes (shortcut 's') after transforming and editing the position of the ball. But before I done this I had to set how many frames I was going to use. As it was just a short animation I set the animation to 2 seconds long (48 frames).

The red lines on the timeline all indicate a keyframe. These four images show the stage of the animation at the first four keyframes.

To make the camera rotate around the ball I moved the pivot point to underneath the ball in the first frame and added a keyframe. I clicked on the the 48th frame and rotated the camera 90 degrees and added another keyframe. That was I needed to do for the animation. All I had to make sure I did was ensure that I had the camera selected when I placed my keyframes, otherwise it would not animate.

After I had created my bouncing ball I decided to animate my ferris wheel. Since I had created the rotating part of the ferris wheel, I felt it was something I could experiment with a little bit. I also created a few cameras to play around with different angles. To animate my ferris wheel I grouped everything that is going to rotate (to ensure it rotates altogether) and rotated it 360 degrees. As ferris wheels go quite slow in rotation I set the animation to 2880 frames, which is 120 seconds. It probably takes a lot longer than 2 minutes for a ferris wheel to an entire rotation but for the purpose of experimentation I feel this is more than enough time. The 2 minutes also give me plenty of time to experiment with camera movement.

This is a playblast of my bouncing ball animation.