Secondary Action - Tail Ball

Critical Evaluation

This is the Secondary Action - Tail Ball exercise playblast, using Autodesk Maya.

Firstly, the main topic of this project was the Secondary Action principle. In this case, main action is the ball jumping on the floating surface, and the secondary action is the motion of the tail, because it is not necessary for the important action to happen. However, various kinds of principles are also evident in this animation. In my opinion, the anticipation as the ball squashes and rotates in the beginning of the action, is very efficient, because the timing is slow enough for the object to gather its energy in order to make the leap. Furthermore, I moved the floating surface further, because the arc was not curved enough. I used Motion Trail, moved the points of the curve to reshape the arc, and I believe, that the movement is more believable and less mechanical, as it would be if the arc was straight. Additionally, the follow through of the landing is also portrayed by the squash of the ball, and its timing and spacing is appropriate enough to demonstrate the power of this leap. The action is not very fast or slow. In terms of spacing, I could say that the ease in helps the depiction of this energy.

On the other side, I believe that the tail motion is not very successful. This would be probably due to the fact that there is no overlapping action. Unfortunately, I did not know how to achieve this technically, thus, all of the joints of the tail move at the same time (their key positions are on the same frame). This also lead to another problem. I could not focus on the spacing of each joint rotation, thus, their motion is not so relative to the power of the squash and stretch of the main action. In addition, the tail could be more curved when the object is in the air or on the floating surface. However, I believe that the secondary motion in the beginning is more successful, because the problem with the overlap is not very obvious, and also the timing is coherent with the main action; the tail stretches forward as the ball is squashed, thanks to the anticipation, and stretched backwards as the ball stretches releasing the energy forth to leave the ground.

I would prefer to understand my mistakes and upload an improved version of this project.