Now that all the basic models are done and ready, the next step is to make the actual animation which you can find in the storyboard from one of my earlier posts.
The first thing we covered were handles. Essentially handles create a parent for objects or groups.
The way I created the handle, I made a 2d sphere which is scaled around the two objects. I then shift selected the two shapes and middle mouse dragged them into the 2d sphere.
This comes in handy when I need to manipulate multiple groups at the same time, without combining the object into one mesh.
The next task was to create a bouncing ball animation. The idea behind the bouncing ball animation was to understand the concept of realistic animation. Usually when I ball bounces, it flattens when hitting the floor and stretches when bouncing up. When recreating this in Maya, you have to consider the scaling of the ball at the right times. To make this much simpler, I used a reference image which clearly demonstrates the physics of a bouncing ball.
As you can see in the reference, the trajectory in which the ball drops gets steeper the closer the ball is to the ground. Essentially, all I had to do is move the location of the ball from point 1 to point 2, set a key frame and repeat for each frame.
The final task was to create a basic flight part for one of my star wars ships. For this I used the x-wing. The first thing I had to do is create a handle for my x-wing. Then, I used the Bezier tool to create a very simple path. Once these were done, I selected the handle for my x-wing and shift selected the path. Making sure that my menu is set to animation, I went to Constrain | Motion Paths | Attach to Motion Path.
In the next post, I will demonstrate how to actually render these as animations.
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