In the first week of term 2, we had our first contact with animation basics, trying to animate two bouncing balls made of different materials. We also started to design our first project of the term, the Rube Goldberg machine.
Firstly, we started a quick model of a basic staircase as a base of our first animation. Then, we created two spheres to start our bouncing animation. The first ball is suppose to be made of rubber, therefore, the animation needs to show a high bounce on each step of the staircase. The second is made of metal, so it should look heavier and less bouncy. We set the basic key frames for each jump, and then adjusted the animation with the ‘Graph Editor’. With this last tool, we can see the graphic of the animation, therefore, we could tweak each movement to make it look more realistic.
After understanding the principles of manual animation, we dived into ‘Bullet Physics’ in Maya. This plug-in is specialised in the interaction between the geometry of a 3D scene. In order to practice with this tool, we were assigned to create a Rube Goldberg Machine, using basic shapes that would interact with each other.
Before using this tool, the programme needs to be set up to be able to see the ‘Bullet’ tab in the programme’s menu. Once everything is set, we can start designing our machine. The first thing that popped in my mind when we were introduced to this project, was an instagramer that I follow on Instagram known as ‘Enbiggen’. He specialises in creating these 3D Rube Goldberg machines to reproduce the music of any known song, movie soundtrack, etc. I have attached two of his creations that inspired me:
As a first idea of my Rube Goldberg’s machine, I came up with the following sketches as possible designs:
Once the machine was planned, I continued to build it up in Maya. After designing and placing the basic geometry in the 3D scene, I set them as ‘Active rigid body’ or ‘Passive rigid body’ depending if I wanted the polygon to act as a dynamic object or as a static object. Once this is set, I needed to rewind the animation until the beginning (so Maya calculates how the objects would interact between each other), and to adjuste them as needed afterwards. This needs to be precise as the programme can be very picky with these calculations and can cause some errors at the time of setting up each object’s bullet action. Also, as I wanted to make objects spin, I added constrains to some of the polygons using a ‘hinge’ option, placed in the middle of the object (‘Rigid Body Constrain’ tool).
I am struggling a bit with the set up of the actions and adjustment of this as whenever I closed the programme and reopened the scene later on, the same actions that I set up previously, were reacting and behaving differently. I flushed the playback cache to see if this helped but it was doing the same. I had the same problems in both the university computer and in my personal computer.