Animate and Rig a Bouncing Ball in Maya
Learn advanced techniques for modeling, rigging, and animating a bouncing ball. Software required: Maya 2016
What you'll learn
Throughout these lessons, we'll explore modeling, rigging and animating a bouncing ball. We'll cover rigging rationales and methods for rigging two distinct types of balls. We'll discuss methods of animating these balls naturally and as distinct characters in and of themselves. This course discusses music as a starting point for timing and presents methods for executing a short animation. The course concludes by discussing lighting and rendering techniques applicable to enhance the storyline. Software required: Maya 2016
Table of contents
- Specifying the Character Creation Parameters 9m
- Beginning a "Simple" Ball Rig 8m
- Finishing the "Simple" Ball Rig 11m
- Adding Different Geometry to the "Simple" Ball Rig 7m
- Creating the Ball and the Control Curves 6m
- Scripting the Nurbs Curve Creation Script 11m
- Grouping the Controls and Add Control Joints 8m
- Hooking up the Multiplydivide Nodes 10m
- Adding the Lattice and Clusters 8m
- Using an Enumerated Attribute 13m
- Examining Reference Video 10m
- Animating the "Physics-based" Bounce 11m
- Finishing the Bounce Animation 13m
- "Animating" the Ball 12m
- Blocking the Translations 1 10m
- Squashing and Stretching the Ball 8m
- Planning the Animation 9m
- Blocking the Translations 2 12m
- Animating the Freeform Ball, AKA "the Shmoo" 13m
- Blocking the Translations Using Stepped Keys 12m
- Animating the Doubletake 10m
- Refining the Doubletake 11m
- Changing from Stepped to Plateau Keys 12m
- Creating a Top to Bottom Bounce 10m
- Creating Fluid Poses 13m
- Beginning the Tail Creation Process 11m
- Creating FK Controls for the Tail and Making Switch Controls 12m
- Cleaning up the Visibility Controls 11m
- Controlling the Tail 11m
- Playblasting for Multiple Cameras 11m
- Test Rendering the Ball Animations 11m
- Preparing for Animation Rendering 6m
- Script Rendering Multi-camera Animation 12m
About the author
Eric Kunzendorf has been teaching computer graphics and animation at the college level for the last two decades at such varied institutions as Jacksonville University, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, the Atlanta College of Art, and the School of Visual Arts’ Savannah campus. He holds a Bachelors of Arts in Art history from Columbia University and a Masters of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia. Eric has contributed to several works including "Mastering Maya 8.... more