Principles of Animation

Once I had been through the basic principles of using the software we had the opportunity to move onto looking at more complicated shapes and also looked at adding animation into it so that we could get used to that as well. We first starting by looking at a pendulum and animated it so that it looked realistic and acted like a real pendulum would. Below is an image of how the finished animation looked on all of the pendulum animations that I made.

(Pendulum 1 demonstrates the easing in and out principle.)

(Pendulum 2 demonstrates overlapping action principle.)

 (Pendulum 3 demonstrates the followthrough principle.)

I then moved onto animating a ball dropping from a certain height and then bouncing to a slow stop. While animating this I made sure to take into account what type of ball it would be as balls of different weights and material would bounce differently. I choice a regular ball that would have been the same sort of material and weight of a tennis ball as it was an simple one to start out with as I haven't used this kind of software before. I also then did another ball drop this time using a soft ball which when dropped would squash slightly and then not bounce as high as the previous one. 

 (Ball Drop 1 demonstrates easing in and out again principle)

(Ball Drop 2 demonstrates squash and stretch principle)

Once I was more comfortable using the software I then moved onto creating another quick animation that looked at a ball jumping up; which coincidentally would also help me with my own animation as I have a ball that bounces in mine too. In this animation I again used the squash and stretch principle to be able to make the ball jumping more realistic and again I used the idea that the ball was a similar material to a tennis ball and moved in a similar way.

(Ball Jump demonstrates both anticipation and squash and stretch.)

After this I then looked quickly at different lighting techniques so that when it came to adding it to my own animation I could add it in successfully and make to look correct. For this part of the project I used three-point lighting using lights set up in different places around the object so that they were illuminated properly and this is the finished image below.

 (3 Point Lighting.)