Some weeks ago I finally finished with the ball bounces animations, at least for some time, so I decided to move on to the next stage, the pendulum!
Last week I began working on a pendulum animation but I was having a lot of trouble, I just couldn't make it look right. The problem I had was that the last time I had animated a pendulum was probably 5 months ago and by then, the animation looked "good" to my eye. Now that I look at it, I see how bad it was, and now I'm having trouble improving it because I haven't learend new things about pendulums!
Hopefully, Tony Chau (check his blog on the links section, he's an AM student and I've never met someone who knows as much of body mechanics and principles as him) suggested me to study the wave principle. I'd never heard of it before, maybe with other names, but I'd never paid attention to it. Anyways, after some research I kind of understood the idea so I opened up Maya and rigged some kind of tentacle that looked like an inverted pendulum.
I failed the first time I animated it, the timing was a mess, and I didn't even have defined what was an extreme or a breakdown, so I deleted everything and grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper. I laid out the extreme poses, breakdowns and while I did that and drew this kind of tentacle, I finally understood the idea of the wave principle. I went back to Maya and made the animation super organized, I used 4 extreme poses and 4 breakdowns. After checking the spacing and then messing up with the timing a bit, I polished the last things and did a playblast. Luckily, I really liked it and I could feel the wave effect. So, here is how it looks. Now I have to go back to my pendulum and apply all this stuff that I've learned!
-- Jero
cool!
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