Follow Through and Overlapping Action - Cape Ball

Critical Evaluation 

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

Initially, the main topic of this project was the principle of follow through and overlapping action. The first bend was animated from the start, thus, I had to animate the Onoff attribute for the ball to leave the board, as it bends up and the sphere is thrown in the air. I created bounces by setting keys on Translate X and Y axes, and used the Motion Trail to select and move the keyframe points on the curve, editing the curvature of the motion. Additionally, I set a keyframe on the last key of the translation to rotate the sphere due to the thrown.

On the one side, I believe that the bending of the board after the ball leaves it is very effective. I only used 3 frames for each bend, and the distance between the extreme poses was decreasing, as the power was decreasing, too. Furthermore, in my opinion, the spacing of the last bounces is appropriate enough to give the impression of a physics based motion.

On the other side, I faced many problems. Firstly, I could not understand how to animate the cape controllers effectively in order to achieve the desired motion demonstrated in the demo video. The animation is not efficient from the beginning, because the moving cape passes through the surface of the board, as the latter bends down. In addition, I approached the animation using my own impression of movement, but, I did not stretched the cape as the ball was rotating before it reaches the ground, because the poses of the rotation were not similar with the ones of the video. Plus, the rotation of the sphere in the start is also problematic, probably due to a technical issue. In my opinion, the spacing of the sphere as it falls is a little bit linear, I attempted to manipulate the curves of the Translate Y attribute, but the distance between the poses was not increasing, as I observed it through ghosting. Furthermore, the ease in as the ball leaves the board is not constructed properly and I could not give the impression of energy released due to the throw.

In believe that this was a very challenging project and I would prefer to understand my mistakes and make a second attempt to complete it.