Week 11 Lab 1: Animation - 3D

Exercise 1
Lesson 1: Keyframes and the Graph Editor
Link: http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2011help/index.html

Reflection
For the exercise, we are told to complete Lesson 1 from Maya Tutorials to learn about Keyframes and the Graph Editor in Maya. Overall, the exercise is simple and I managed to grasp the basics. I was introduced to the playback controls in Maya and I learned how to set keys for attributes and use the Graph Editor to edit the animation and remove unnecessary keys for the animation to run faster and more smoothly.

Exercise 2
For this exercise, we are told to animate a bouncing ball in Maya using what has been learned in Exercise 1.

Process

Bouncing ball with bounce distance issues

The distance between the ball should decrease after each bounce because the energy in the ball decreases after every bounce.

This is how it looks like after the changes are made:

Bouncing ball with bounce distance issues resolved

Reflection
When animating the bouncing ball for Exercise 2 in Maya, I found it challenging especially the process of editing the frames of the animation. I realized if I made some changes to one aspect of the animation, other aspects of the animation may also be altered especially those that are already done well. I learned that I need to be patient when doing animations because things will go haywire if I get frustrated.