Mess Around 1

In this post, I will talk about a couple of bits and pieces I done with animating and my experience with the graph editor. As this is the first time I am getting back into using Maya, I decided to do a simple animating of a bouncing ball. May not be human animating practise but, any practise is good practise.

So, I won't go into too much detail about animating the bouncing but I will admit that the Auto Key function (which sets Keys on the timeline once you have declared which values you're animating) was good help. 

Screenshot of the scene and the Graph Editor

So, to sum up what the graph editor is: it's basically a visual representation of what what's been animated on the timeline of an object. The black dots in the graph editor represent the keys are in the timeline - each key shows where a specific action ends. So, the line going in an arc is Translate Y curve - so, where the object has reaches the peak of it's height and then descends. The rest of the lines going down at the bottom are the values of where the object has been scaled to help give it that bounce look (squashed and stretched).

A screenshot of the Graph Editor after I messed about with some of the values

While it is used to help refine your animations to make them more convincing I figured that for the sake of this post - I'd thought that it would be a bit more interesting to play about with some of the values. So, while the arc that's Translate Y has remained the same, other lines such as the Scale Z have been heavily tampered with - so from the frame 8, the ball will expand from the Z axis to the value of about 9, will result in the ball being stretched out more than it did originally.

A screenshot of what the ball looks like now at Frame 8

That's pretty much it for the post, I just thought it would be good to share some small bits and pieces - they will be more to come once I do more of this kind of thing. Until then.