I found this to be a very difficult exercise at first. Due to the fact that I had never rigged a ball before, i struggled with this animation and so only created a fairly basic animation based on the fact that i was learning. My original story took inspiration from the fence animation in the demo folder with the character meant to be a cat. It is following the way that a cat moves across the top of a fence but as it is a ball, it is bouncing from post to post. It comes to a gap in the fence, the obstacle, and is hesitant to cross it before finally committing to the jump.
The rigging process was a learning experience and i found that i am so much better at rigging a bipedial character than a ball (which should be simple). The skin on the tail decided to stop working half way through the animation too and so the tail appears rigid rather than the curve that had been there following the modelling and rigging.
I feel that the parts of this that worked are fairly minimal. The timing needed to be much better and even after manipulating the graph editor for some time, it looked like a mess.
It was from here that I decided to entirely change my idea to that of a fish swimming through obstacles in an aquarium. I watched some videos of how fish move and learned that the smaller fish have short graceful movements. The character isn't meant to be thinking much as it swims and the clip could be played on loop as the character probably would forget the experience almost immediately. It's motivation is as simple as that it intends to pass through these obstacles but treats without emotion, like a fish would.
The animation worked well in the area of movement and look. The fish moves well and i believe that the camera angles that i used added to the overall fluidity of the animation with the fish tail moving nicely in different directions, almost as if the viewer was following the fish. I ended up doing more than just primitives as i extended the basic shape in order to form the tail. The eyes are primitive though. If i was to improve anything in this animation then it would be the jittery nature in some areas as it can be vaguely hard to follow due to my camera angle not always focusing on the fish. I had intended to enhance the belief of the environment thanks to the visor underwater lighting tools but an issue with the batch render eliminated this possibility, something that I intend to try and rectify in any future projects.
I used this video to look at the movements of various fish, I also looked at various images on pinterest which can be found on my "Visual and animated research for module" board. I found this to be very interesting and helpful as I was able to study the movement of the fish.
https://uk.pinterest.com/josephlearoyd/visual-and-animated-research-for-module/
Villarreal, Oscar, Virtual aquarium, https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=fish+moving+in+an+aquarium&&view=detail&mid=70682C58A87D62A24EC770682C58A87D62A24EC7&FORM=VRDGAR,
12 September 2012
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=fish+moving+in+an+aquarium&&view=detail&mid=70682C58A87D62A24EC770682C58A87D62A24EC7&FORM=VRDGAR
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