Bouncing Ball Tutorial

I was given the task of following the grid below. It shows frame by frame of how to animate a bouncing ball. 

The idea was to make a key frame as every numbered point where there was a filled black circle. But there were issues in animating it regarding rotation to to polish the animation I also added a single frame before and after the ball makes contact with the floor (frames 6, 8, 16, 18, 24, 26 and 30).

Following the tutorial was really easy and simple but helped me get around how the key frames worked. Issue I had was that on occasion I would manipulate the sphere to fit in with the next key frame and I would have forgotten initially to select the frame I wanted use.

I also added flat cube surface as a floor so when viewing to was easier to see the points of bounce.

Here is the graph editor of the bouncing ball example.

You can see the bouncing ball follows the green line that curves up and down. After finishing the last key frame I had improved this line so it followed the path to a higher quality.

Handles

Handles allow the manipulation of objects to become a lot easier. Using grouping in the Outliner, I have made the cone and sphere a child of the 2D circle found in 'curves/surfaces'. Now if I select the cone or sphere an manipulate either it will happen separately, but if i manipulate the circle both the cone and sphere will be manipulated along with it.

1. Create 2 separate objects.
2. Create the 2D circle.
3. Open the outliner, select both 3D objects created in the first step and drag to the 2D circle in the outliner using the middle mouse button.

Houston, we have a problem.

Upon inspection of my models, I wanted to make final tweaks here and there to perfect each one. When I opened up Maya 2016 for mt TIE-Fighter I saw this mess in the engine area. For an odd reason once I had saved everything it had messed with my edges and vertices to create this mess. I have edited it since to clean it up. But this is a noteworthy issue.

Multiple Extrudes

Extruding Multiple Faces

While creating my models I had acquired a love for the extruding tool as it made it very easy and simple to manipulate simple objects into more complicated ones. Previous to this example I was not completely sure how to create the 2 extruding faces equally. But using the connect tool between the above and below edges I could cut a perfect middle edge to separate the faces. Once I had done that I extruded a smaller face into both faces and used the vertices to make them equal. Once equal I highlighted both faces I wanted to extrude and performed the extrusion.

Boolean Difference Manipulation

I had realised there were 4 vents in each side piece of the Star Destroyer and wanted in semi-circular edge or cut into the object but was not sure how to do so.

My first attempt was to place a cylinder and then a cube inside of that where I would rotate the cube to cut away more than just from top to bottom but across the edge. I found this did not work at all and left straight edges inside that looked very messy.

My second attempt was to replace the cube with another cylinder so the other cut was rounded also. The end product left an almost figure '8' shape across the object and looked messy once again.

My third and final attempt was a success. Rather than using 2 object to cut, i would just manipulate the single one. By selecting a semicircle in the top face and translating it across it created the perfect effect for what i wanted to but cut out of my object.

Moving and Scaling Multiple Objects

TIE-Fighter Duplicate Wings

Initially I had just duplicated all the object required to create the wing for the purpose of having two symmetrical wings and saving the time of re-creating everything from scratch. Only issue I had from this was that all the object would rotate separately and would be muddled all over the screen rather than staying attached in the correct areas.



Above is the final example of how i had done this.

 I have gone to Windows > Outliner and selected all the objects making the one wing.

Once that was done and all objects were highlighted in the outliner I used Ctrl + G to group these objects together.

This made it so when I edited the models from the group window, all objects would be edited respectively of where they were and how they were according to its arrangement.

So I duplicated the group from the outliner and from the attribute editor I had scaled it to -1 along the x-axis. This made it so the group was rotated perfectly 180 degrees and was easily translated into its correct position.

Cut or Connect

Using the cut or connect tool can add extra polygons to enhance you model. In the image below I am cutting a line allowing me to create an indented face a window effect.