Week 13 (Animate a moving robot arm)

Exercise 1

So first exercise is to watch how the lamps have a bit of personality to them. Here's the video.

Exercise 2

And exercise 2 is to view a tutorial on how to proper move a robot arm and to make an in-animate object come alive.

The first thing to do is to add joints to the object. So off the wireframe, select Skeleton > Joint tool and keep clicking four points of intersection to show where the joints need to be moved.

Then, click on Panel > Hypergraph panel > Hypergraph to view the parent and child relation. The parent has to be selected and clicked first before the child so the order is correct.

Next is Skeleton > IK handle tool. Then we click on the joint of the arm to the swivel at the center. This ensures that the joints will lie along a single plane and it does not go off course. Next is to click on bind > smooth bind to bind the object itself to the joints so that when the joint moves, the object would move as well.



Now to assign a smaller object so that moving one point does not mean clicking any un wanted pieces.
Once that is done, click Constraint > Parent. Clicking whichever object first is important so as to de note who is the parent and child.

Now, we must make the movement more realistic. It cannot turn 360 degrees at a joint unless I want it that way. By clicking on the right of the attribute editor, I can lock attributes of the X and Z rotation so as it does not turn any other way except up and down. The below pictures should illustrate that perfectly (by moving the arm up and down only, it does turn anywhere else even if I tried!).

Exercise 3

This exercise asks to move the arm to pick up a box and move it around. However, I have issues with that so this is postponed till another day.

For some reason, My playblast is not working. As a matter a fact, my animation overall is not going according to plan either so I will show you screen shots of the movement first. When I have consulted my teacher about it, I will see whether putting up an animation can be done.

Exercise4

1)  Apart from their different sizes, it is obvious from Luxo Jr. that the big lamp is “older” and that the small lamp is “younger”.

How is this communicated by the animation? Give at least THREE examples.

Do NOT say because the small lamp is playing with a ball, or that its name is Luxo Jr. – you should be looking at the animation, how the lamps move and emote (emote means to express emotions).

Ans: The small lamp appears more childish to play with the ball while the big lamp just watches his "son" play with it.

The small lamp shaked his body to show it's kid like actions while the big lamp is more calm and still.

The small lamp jumped on the ball to exert it's curios-ness while the big lamp may have known what will happen.

2)  Give an example from Luxo Jr of how timing is used for comic effect. Explain how the timing decisions contribute to the humour.

 Ans: When the small lamp jumped on the ball and after a while, the ball made a sound and deflated. 

The timing was right as I knew something was going to happen to the ball so the time was right to show the consequences of a lamp jumping on the ball.

3)   When you create a joint chain, these form a hierarchy, with the first joint at the top and the last joint at the bottom. Explain why this is necessary for the joints to work properly.

Usually, the first joint chain at the top should affect the rest of the body. Think of a snake; when the head moves, so will the body according to the head. The secondary joints should not move first because that would look very un natural.