Week 7 - Secondary Action

VIDEO

For this task, we were given a model to animate. The short animation must show use of secondary action. this is different from follow through and overlapping since secondary actions are things that result from a primary action.

For my animation, I wanted to aim for something a bit more. I thought of a brief storyline in my head and followed that, making changes where appropiate. I used secondary action on my parts of the clip. For example, the dogs walking cycle was presented by the bobbing action it does. Its secondary actions were its ears, head and tail. Another example would be the ball. After the dog hits the ball, it bounces off the doghouse and comes backwards it. This is also a secondary action since my primary action was the dog hitting the ball and the secondary action was the ball moving/coming back.

I also wanted to give the animation a minor humourisitic feel to it as well. The main issue I had with animating this would be the ball. I had to chose to either use dynamics for the ball or to keyframe. I modelled the ball in Cinema 4D and imported it into Maya and gave it the appropiate textures. After testing the simulation, I saw a lot of issues. The ball was constantly jittering and woundnt stay in place or stay still at all. So I decided that I would have more control if I were to animate this.

Animating this takes away the realism aspect but gives me more control. The second difficult thing was probably the camera. I had to make sure that the camera movement was smooth and didnt have any sharp panning angles or dollys. But aside from those 2 difficulties, I still believe I could have done better with this animation.