Saturday 7 April 2012

A Bouncing Ball rig and an Obstacle Course setup

Hi!
A while ago, I made a quite unspectacular Bouncing Ball rig and an obstacle course, and I thought I'd share it with you here.
The Bouncing Ball even has a tail, although it's quite ugly. Look at this picture.






















Isn't it ugly?
This rig has a few enhancements, the first can be seen at once, it has an offset ctrl if you want to animate it away from it's main handle (if that one is constrained, for example)

The next enhancement is that you can animate the rotation in a multitude of ways, and while the rotation of the main and offset handles affect the squash and stretch, the extra rotation attributes (look at the picture again) are not. Alas, these can only be animated through the values and don't have a fancy gizmo. I hope you don't mind. (if you do, well, I don't)

The tail is hidden by default and can be made visible by turning it "on" at the main ctrl. It has four strictly FK controls.

The ball has squash and stretch, and to rotate the squashing/stretching, you need to rotate either the main (not so good) or the offset handle (better idea) Since this is happening via a nonlinear squash deformer, this feature is rather ugly as well. I might get around to making this more beautiful sometime.

Have fun, and let me know if something isn't working :D



The Obstacle Course has the bouncing ball rig referenced.

This one is far easier to explain, it has the above mentioned Bouncing ball rig referenced, you can either point Maya to the rig, or click cancel upon prompt and reference your own rig.
This is made to be looked at from the orthogonal front view.

The stuff that can be animated has some control objects, and the tubes feature one locator each, located at the exact middle of them, so you can constrain the ball to these locators and rotate them to have the balls move along the tubes.

Have fun again!

Cheers!