Maya animation workshop #1 (Ball bounce + Physics)

This week we did a Maya animation workshop where we learned how to animate in Maya using key frames and physics simulations. To experiment with this, we animated a bouncing ball. However, when I was animating the ball using key frames, I made the mistake of rotating it on the object axis rather than the world axis. This meant that when it came to animating the squash and stretch the axis was rotated and I couldn’t scale the ball in the right direction. This led to my first test animation not having any squash or stretch in it when the ball bounced. Beyond this however I did learn a lot about how key frames work in Maya which was good as I had no prior experience in animation in the software. Comparatively the physics simulation was much less work as the program did all of the heavy lifting for me.

After the workshop ended however I came into some problems with rendering out the animations as a video file. After I had looked up how to add materials to the scene, I tried to export the render, following a YouTube tutorial. However, the tutorial didn’t make clear a very important part about how a certain setting changed the file name of the images that were outputted as a sequence. This meant that when it came time to import the sequence into premier, I came into a lot of problems as the files were not named correctly. This led to me spending a couple of hours figuring this problem outs, in addition to dealing with other technical issues. However, in the end I was able to produce a video file of the two animations from the workshop. The main takeaway that I took from this was that I found it weird that there wasn’t a way of exporting the animation straight into video without having to use premier. I don’t know if other programs have this feature either as I haven’t experimented with animation much, but it seemed like a pretty clunky process for if you wanted to render out a simple test animation.

Additional Research:

Exporting Rendered Animation from Maya (2016) Directed by Host-Madsen, H. Youtube. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQtSJfxPBsA&t=81s (Accessed 15/03/2021).

LinkedIn Learning (2017) Understanding the basic shader types | Maya 2018 Essential Training from LinkedIn Learning. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKpr05t_ZzM (Accessed 14/03/2021).