Week 4 - Slow in Slow out, Newtons Cradle

Above is my animation to explain how slow in and slow out works. As we can see, when the ball reaches its maximum velocity or its max height, the ball slows down to a halt before it falls back downwards and speeds up. From a physics perpsective, the kinectic energy of the ball that hits the rest transfers its kinectic energy from each of the balls towards the ball on the opposite end. When the energy reaches the ball on the opposite end, the ball swings up into the air and repeats the same process.

I did have some problems animating this as it was hard to determine what movement the balls in the middle would have so I went online to gather some research and found out that the ball in the middle has very little or no movement at all, whilst the balls on the opposing sides of the ball in the middle, swings towards the ball that is going upwards on its end.

Week 3 - Squash and Stretch Dino

This animation was to focus on the principles of squash and stretch. To demonstrate this, I used a dinosaur rig to explain how squash and stretch works. As the dino falls to the 1st platform, we can see its head curl outwards, its legs straighten out and its feet point upwards. As it hits the platform, its body falls and lowers itself, its head drops and curls inwards and its feet align with the platform. After this happens, the dino prepares to jump through the barrier using the actions it used to 'compensate' for its landing. After it jumps through the barrier, it does the same actions again. Preparing to land or hit the platform. This was slightly different as the dinos trajectory was angled and not a straight free fall. After landing on the 2nd platform, the dino again uses its 'landing actions' to prepare for its final jump onto the ground.

The landing for this was slightly different as I decided to let the dino 'skid' on its landing for a second. This overall wasent too difficult to animate as I had planned to give the dino a short walk as it walks to the first platform but decided to leave this out since the focus was to demonstrate squash and stretch and not a dinosaur walking.

Week 2 - Examples of Bad Timing in Animation

The animation above was found on youtube and is a perfect example of bad timing in animation. As we can see, the timing for each of the characters movement is very linear and has no smoothing interpolation intergrated into it, meaning the movements of the arms, legs and head are very robotic, which gives the entire piece a poor animation.

This short was most likely created by someone who doesnt have an idea of how timing works and any experiance of animating as the entire clip is very poorly made. 

Week 2 - Physics vs Cartoon Ball Bounce Animation (Maya)

This short clip was animated in Maya 2016. The purpose of this clip is to show the difference between how a ball would bounce under 2 different aspects. These aspects being a cartoon and physics.

The ball which has the physics aspect applied to it is the one on the left. As we can see the bounce has a rigid shape meaning the ball holds its structural integrity. Although this bounce looks more realistic to how a ball would bounce in real life, this is incorrect as if we were to watch this video, we can see that the gold ball does squash and stretch a bit.

The ball with the cartoon aspect was the ball on the right. As we can see, when the ball drops, the shape elongates as it reaches the ground, once it makes contact with the ground, the ball flattens on the y axis and spreads on the x and z. This is not accurate as well as it is greatly exaggerated. Lastly, the ball again elongates when it goes back up.

In conclusion, both of the animations are incorrect but a mix of two clips, meaning if I were to make another animation clip which has a mix of both of the aspects applied to the two balls, then that would be more accurate since it has the correct amount of each aspect applied to it.