So let me start by saying sorry if the new linking system coursed you any inconvenience, from now on i'll be using the adf.ly short url site as for roughly every 1,000 clicks i get on my links i receive $1, although i dont see myself making much from this as my highest blog view was back in September 2009 when i had 1,600 views i still feel it was worth trying out.


For the people that came here from other means and dont know what im talking about.....when you click a adf.ly link to my blog it will take you to an advert page with a 5 second countdown on the top right corner of the screen, once that reaches 0 it will say "skip ad", just click on that and it will bring you here.....if this gets annoying for people please just leave a comment in any of my posts and if enough people find it a hassle i will set it back to normal.

Thank you for your time......

Now on to the animations, so i just finished week 2 of my new schedule and i must say its going rather well, i had a few issues the other day and for the last 2 days i've been feeling really ill (hence why its taken me 2 days to post) but other then that its all goes great.

I started off this week with a good old bouncing ball excessive as part of the Guardian course and as part of the Slow In & Slow Out class, the task was the have the ball go through 4 different stages starting with a linear up and down motion and ending with a slow in and slow out motion on both the up and down.




Link To Video

I started by placing keys at frame 0, 15 and 30 then using the inbetweens that the computer had already put in there i set a key at frame 13 and moved it back to frame 9, this gave me a slow in on the up of the bounce and i repeated this process for the slow out. this offered a smooth movement and it utilized the computers spacing to get the result i was looking for.

I use this same technique for the slow in and out for the down as well and the combined the 2 to get the final result of slow in and out on both the up and down.

Class 8 was focused on Arcs and how they are present in every organic movement we do so should be studied in great detail.
The Task was the have the ball bounce across the screen in a zigzag and then add breakdowns either side of the first up to create an arc in the movement instead of having it look jagged and sharp.




Link To Video

During this class i found a really useful tool in Maya that i hadn't known about previously which was the Motion Trail option in the Animate menu.

This tool will plot out the motion of the object that it is linked with, to use it this is what you need to do.

Select the object you which to see the tangency of and in the Animate menu click on Create Motion Trail, if you want to get more options click on the small box next to it and the options window will open.


In the options menu you can choose the time rage, the increments of where you want to points to be placed (every 2 frames, every 6 frames, etc) and how it is updated....if you are fine tuning your arcs i would suggest having it on Fast (Update only when keyframes change), there is also the option as to how you would like the points to be displayed, you can choose from a Line which will create a lone between every point and how you exactly where the object will be, Locator which basically shows Nulls where points are and Points which does basically the same thing as Locator but less messy.

there is a final option that called Frames which is the frame number, i have this turned on as you can then see what frame number everything is happening without having to look through the timeline.





Link To Video

Well thats it for this week guys, talk to you all in a weeks time and dont forget to comment about the advert links if you find them troublesome at all.


Thank you.