In this week’s Maya class, I have learnt how to animate a ball falling down the stairs. I have made two different types of balls, a soft one and a hard one.  To let these two balls move, I have to check which axis is front and set a keyframe to decide its direction. After that, we just need to set the y-axis to control the ball’s height.

To let soft ball bounce, what I need to do is to control the curve of y-axis to let it have some waves so that the soft ball will bounce softly and smooth.

The problem that I have is to control the speed of these two balls, my soft ball should jump slower than my hard ball because of bounce, but in my animation, my soft ball jumps way more faster than my hard ball which doesn’t make sense. So to solve this problem, I need to check my Z-axis to drag my z-axis a bit longer than my hard ball so that it will jump a bit slow.

I have also learnt rigging in this week’s class. This is my first time to use rigging tool In Maya and i think this is the most complicate parts for me, because I’m still need to figure out ‘parent’ tool and its working process, to let which part because the main object and how to control these objects. But what I have learnt is how to set up joints and let it work properly. Also in the end, I used Mr. Nick’s  ‘Pick up’ doc to animate my character.

The hardest part during animating the character is to let it move soft and smooth, I need to consider all joints’ movements while making a pose. So before I start to let it move, I need to know all the poses and movements and how is my character going to move, and after that, I can start to do some movements because I will clearly know what is the next movement and which joint will be moved in this movement.