This marked the first week in our next 4 week development project: The Oddly Satisfying animation. While the title of the project seems to be quite vague it is based on a series of animations that can be found online that have become somewhat generified. An example of a compilation of such animations can be found here.
While they can vary wildly in tone from realistic to abstract in both content and color palate I have decided to go with a more abstract piece as to further differentiate this from the last project where I aimed to create a more realistic looking piece.
While I was stumped for a while on what to actually produce I eventually had an idea for a machine that I would deem oddly satisfying that I did a quick sketch of.
The basic idea would be that a ring flows down from the top, onto an arm which then has the ring slide, just perfectly shaped to fit, into the tube and from there the animation would loop infinitely. The abstract comes in as the machine doesn’t resemble anything all that realistic and its purpose is entirely left to interpretation and the oddly satisfying elements would come from its motion down the arm and the tube.
While I eventually figured out how to create an initial prototype I had to modify quite a bit as the perspective of the machine revealed more of it than I had originally planned and while I wanted there to be only one central piece that all arms connected to I, after animating it through a combination of edges converted to lines and line constraints, that the donut would have to phase through 3 other arms to slide down the first arm. This would be too egregious of a breach of realism and turn the animation off from being satisfying. Another issue I had was, to fill up space, it was recommended I added a plate that the tube could come from and make the scene more visually interesting
As I hadn’t made this first version in the center of the world or with any precision I was left with the choice to start again and be careful setting it up or attempt to make it symmetrical by hand. After trying by hand I realized it’d be useless to do so and instead recreated my progress in a new scene where I was careful to make everything symmetrical.
Another facet of this week’s class was MASH. A powerful motion graphics system in Maya. While I experimented with it I did not ultimately use it in this current version of my animation. This is something I want to change as I should try to learn as much of Maya as I can so this weekend I will watch MASH tutorials to get a wider grasp on what MASH can do so I can implement it.
I also made some slight modifications to the camera work of my Rube Goldberg machine and re-rendered it. As my instructor Nick pointed out that my cut goes against the main idea of Rube Goldberg machine animation where it is meant to be a single continuous shot to show off cause and effect.