In week 6 I learned everything about rigging and animation. We started with animating two spheres bouncing from a staircase. Each sphere has a different weight and so has different bouncing behaviour. Firstly I blocked out the animation by creating a keyframe at every frame where the ball touched the stairs. I then moved and edited the animation tangents to shape the animation curve.
During the rest of the week, we practised rigging and character animation. We created a very simple blocky robot. I had to make sure that all geometry is grouped in a correct parent hierarchy. I had to also edit pivot points so pivots are in the correct positions where it would make sense for a body part to rotate from. I then created joints for the body. I used parent constraint to connect the joint with geometry. I had to organise the joints so they are kept in the correct parent hierarchy. I used IK solver for legs. In this process, the parameters of each articulation, in a jointed flexible object will be automatically calculated to achieve the desired pose, especially when one of the endpoints moves. I continued working on the rig by creating controllers – splines. Each spline is parented to joint. At this point, the rig was finished and I continued creating simple character animation.
I animated the character to pick up a ball from the ground. The animation is very simple and I honestly spent little time working on it. To make the ball stick to the hand I had to create a switch between two constraints. I created two locators one representing the ground and another that is representing the ball. The ball locator is parented to the ground and to the spline of the hand. When the robot is grabbing the ball I animated a switch from the ground constraint to the hand constraint. In this way, the ball is sticking to the hand.