Assignment description:
Animate a pendulum swing that decays over time. In this animation you are visually simulating the effects of gravity.

Minimum requirements:
Build the pendulum out of 2 primitives, a cylinder and a cone. Scale the cylinder to be the arm of the pendulum and the use the cone are the tip. Then group these objects and relocate the group's pivot point for the pendulum swing. Keep initial animation length to 300 frames.

Once you have created your animation, scale the timing to both shorten and then lengthen the number of frames of the animation and observe how changing the timing effects our perception of the weight of the pendulum.

Introduces:

• sine wave motion
• graph decay at top and bottom of a motion curve
• gravity as an outside force
• scale keyframes to add weight
• placement of keys as animation progresses

Things to consider:

• how does timing effect the look of the weight?
• where are keyframes placed in relationship to each other as the motion comes to a stop?

Readings:

• Timing for Animation, Whitaker and Halas, What is good Timing, pg. 12
• Timing for Animation, Whitaker and Halas, The basic unit of time in animation, pg. 18-19
• Principles of 3D Computer Animation, O'Rourke, Chapter 3, pgs. 147 - 158
• How to Animate Film Cartoons, Blair, Timing & Spacing Patterns, pg. 8

Tutorials:

• Learning Maya 3.0, online pdf by Alias|Wavefront, Lesson 5, Working with Maya
• Learning Maya 3.0, online pdf by Alias|Wavefront, Lesson 6, The Dependency Graph

PDF file for the Learning Maya 2.0 tutorials is in Network Neighborhood\Grumpy\MayaDocs\


Record the shape of the main action curve from the Graph Editor here, include labeling on horizontal and vertical axes:

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