Sweet, Sweet CGI

Ahhhhhhhhhhh, finally let the Maya begin.

So we had to animate two balls in Maya for this week's 3D assignment. Each ball had to appear as though it were a different weight to the other as it bounced across the screen. We were introduced to the graph editing and the keyframing tools as well as the playblast function. Georg actually mentioned a way of creating the bouncing ball using dynamics which sounded really interesting and, while it may not be real animation, its something I'd love to learn how to do. So I animated my bouncy ball and then a much heavier one, perhaps a cannonball or bowling ball? Using the graph editor and the orthographic front view I tweaked the bezier handles on the curves of the X and Y axis. Then I got a bit carried away and added a light, shaded the balls using the phong material (green and red respectively) and rendered the whole sequence out using raytracing reflection and refraction...and some motion blur(ah motion blur).

Here it is: