This week we worked on pendulum animation as an introduction to post-movement and follow-through. I practiced overlapping action by making each part follow the previous one instead of moving at the same time, which helped me understand the importance of timing between connected parts. This task served as preparation for future exercises, and after initially overcomplicating my first attempt, I simplified the animation to achieve a cleaner and more effective result.
First attempt:
Reworked version:
Planning: The overkill try, then for the final result I used only the last middle line:
This week, we also I worked on the juice box falling animation, focusing on showing the difference in weight between boxes. The goal was to make each box feel different when it falls, depending on whether it is empty, half-full, or full.
While working on this task, I faced several new challenges in Maya. One of the main problems was handling the controllers correctly. Since the box had multiple controllers, I often selected the wrong one, which caused the box to separate or suddenly jump between frames. This was frustrating at first and made the animation harder to control.
To better understand the motion, I bought real juice boxes and filmed my own reference videos. This really helped me see how different weights fall in different ways, especially because of the center of gravity. Translating that feeling of weight into animation was quite challenging, but experimenting with timing and movement helped me make the differences more visible on screen.
Overall, this task pushed me to observe real-world physics more carefully and made me more aware of how weight and balance can be communicated through animation.
Reference: