Animation Assignments

We'll instead of 1 week it took me two weeks to finish the animation assignments...The main reason for that is that my computer has been acting weird for a few days now ,so I had no choice but reinstall everything on my computer. And when you do something like that of course there will be alot of little issues that take alot of time to fix. Now everything is working perfect again, except for 1 or 2 small programs..but you can't have everything right.

Anyway, about the assignment this was the most difficult one so far. That's because it involed using constraints. Constraints are basically connection points wich are used to connect 3D object together. So when you see a 3D character picking something up or holding it in his hands/tentacles/claws etc in a 3D movie, you can be pretty sure there were constraints involved. And since I've never used it before I needed to get used to it, but I'm getting the hand of it slowly but surely...

Now below I've uploaded the two assignments that I've finished last week. Starting with the crane picking up a green can and placing it on a platform...

I'm pretty happy with how the animation turned out, but because I reinstalled Maya the default settings were restored, so I couldn't use the tool I needed to add weight to the can just after it finished sliding. You just see there's something wrong with it at 0:07 sec. But it was too late for me to fix it because i had another assignment waiting on me. But overall I cant complain with how it turned out to be...

The other assignment was was to use timing and spacing to create a heavy and a light ball.

This assignment also had its problems because I started animating the lit that opens first. And then the heavy ball falling out of the box. I still think that the heavy ball falls to fast, but I'm unable to fix it because I'll have to reanimate the lit all over again. Sure it seems like nothing but I actually spend 5 hours working on that. So basically if I change the speed of the heavy ball I'll have to begin all over again, because the ball would go through the lit. And since I've put alot of hours into that I decided to leave the heavy ball like that. Hope it's not THAT noticable.

Ok so at this moment it's 02:45 am in the morning. And I'm working on next weeks assingment. It's actually a one legged character and we have to make him do a jump. I'm halfway now so I hope I can upload it in 3 days...

Here's what the model looks like.