Follow Through and Overlapping Action - Hammer

Critical Evaluation

This is the Follow Through and Overlapping Action - Hammer exercise playblast, using Autodesk Maya.

Firstly, the main topic of this project was the principle of follow through and overlapping action. I set keyframes on the Rotate Z attribute of the spring mesh, but also assigned it a bend deformer, in order to reinforce the follow through of the object as the hammer hits the ground. I used 3 frames for each up rotation and 3 for each down rotation, and the same timing for the bend attribute. My purpose was to create a coherent motion between the deformer and the orientation. That is the reason that I used the same timing and the same spacing, making the tangents flat and unified, in order to set the motion contiguous, except from the ones where the follow through begins, making them linear to create the slow in effect. When the curves had the same shape, I selected the handles of both curves and manipulated them together.

One the one hand, the motion of the spring depicts the element of follow through very effectively. I achieved that by viewing the poses through the frames using ghosting. In my first attempt, the poses were the same as the object was moving, but the effect of this movement is decreased due to energy loss.

On the other hand, I animated the spring from the start of the animation before the hammer started rotating, because the movie would be played in a loop to create continuous motion. This probably resulted to a less flowing motion, because the spacing between the last and the first keyframe of the timeline is maybe distant. Furthermore, the vibrations are not the same, because the hammer begins to rotate early enough, so there is no much time for it to rotate and bend, as for the second vibration.

In my opinion, thanks to this project I was occupied with the follow through principle and spacing manipulation.