Ball, Pendulum, Lamp Animation

First attempt:

Started learning the fundamentals of animation and tried animating a pre-made pendulum model. Learned how to set up the work space and navigate the animation options such as moving through the timeline, adding new keyframes, making the animation faster and slower by manipulating the timeline.

Started learning to animate by looking at the 12 principles of animation, focusing mainly on the ones applicable to the project such as slow in and slow out, overlapping action, arcs,  timing and attempting to apply them to the animation by adding frames in the appropriate places and positioning the pendulum in good positions. This was supposed to create the illusion of physics affecting the pendulum

I think my attempt could have been better. It doesn’t move naturally and some time was used up focusing on a previous attempt. Unsure of the way the end of the pendulum should drag behind because of the weight. Other than that, I have improved with using Maya to animate.

Final attempt:

I animated the pendulum rig by creating a keyframe at the start middle and end and noticed that it straightens out in the middle of the animation because of the weight of the pendulum. Added a slow in/slow out movement because it looked robotic without it. By the time it gets to the opposite swing I decided not make it look like it was curling round because there wasn’t enough momentum and it appeared unrealistic.

Happy with the general movement of the lamp. I included a slow anticipation of the jump, fast movement up, landing and bouncing up as an overlapping action. The overall animation is slightly fast

Overall the ball bouncing looks okay but it shouldn’t stretch as it falls. It should only realistically stretch as it bounces off the ground which squashes it. In the Graph editor I could manually change the momentum and arcs of the ball without editing individual keyframes which made the process easier.