Lab 1: Bouncing Ball
IDS 352: 3D Advance Animation,
Fall 2014
Due Date: The beginning of class on Tuesday on Sept 2
Goals
- Review Maya interface and animation tools.
- Review Principals of Animation .
- Understand how forces and/or intentions & emotions drive your animation.
Summary of References
Instructions
Maya files provided for this lab may be found on cs-render in the folder \IDS352Fa14\Lab1\Lab1Materials
Part 1: Review Principles of Animation (nothing to turn in)
Part 2: Review Maya Tools (nothing to turn in)
- Watch the following Digital-Tutors to review the Maya 2015 interface and animation tools. Open up
Maya and try tools as you watch the tutorials. The project files are on cs-render.
Part 3: Bouncing Ball
- Work on cs-render in the folder IDS352Fa14/Lab1/MayaProjects/your_name. If you prefer to work
on you own computer, please transfer your Maya project over to this folder by the due date.
- Read or watch the following bouncing ball references:
- Create a new Maya project and copy the Ball Rig into your scenes folder.
You will use this ball rig as a starting point for your animations. Before beginning, explore the
animation controls so that you are familiar with how they work.
- Create an animation of the following. There should be a separate scene file for each. In each case,
the ball should be moving from one side of the screen to the
other, however, you should start by just having your ball go up an down.
- A basic "vanilla" bouncing ball with squash and stretch. Be sure to use the graph editor to adjust tangents.
- A very heavy ball. Before beginning, identify the characteristics that differeniate a heavy from a light ball.
What will change from your vanilla ball?
- A squashy, springy ball. Be able to articulate how this will differ from your vanilla or your heavy ball.
- An angry ball.
- Rendering: You can test your animation using Playblast. For the final animation, please add a ground
plane. Batch render the images, e.g. to jpg files if you want better quality. In this case, use
Adobe Premier (or whatever video editor you want) to generate the final quicktime file.
Use the side camera (at least for the vanilla ball).
Deliverables
For assignments in general, we ask that you submit your animations to two places:
- A specified folder on cs-render: this will make it easy for everyone in the class to look at and evaluate your work.
- WISE: this will make it easy for the instructors to access your files from off campus and to keep track of
who has turned in what when. There may be a file size
limitation (50MB?) on WISE so your need to make sure your files are not too large. If this is a problem,
please consult the instructors.
For this assignment:
By Tuesday, Sept 2, at the beginning of class, place your 4 animations on cs-render in folder
IDS352Fa14/Lab1/FinalAnimations/your_name. Please name them in a way that makes it clear what is what.
Also, add them as attachments to the class WISE site for Lab 1 (under assignments).
