In this first CGI workshop I learned the basics of animating in Maya - setting manual keyframes and then editing them in the graph editor. I found that moving the object around the plane manually and setting keyframes at certain positions in the timeline created very basic movements, either slow or fast, so using the graph editor is essential to making movements more dynamic. By manipulating the anchors on the curves I was able to control the speed and movement of the object between keyframes as well as moving the keyframes themselves. I became familiar with these methods by creating a bouncing ball animation.
Learning how to use the graph editor is essential to my ability to create personality in my animation, making it much less linear and giving me more control over the action. This is, of course, relevant to character animation, which is an area I am very interested in. For example, working with tangents allows me to adhere to the twelve principles of animation proposed by the Disney studio, particularly 'anticipation' and 'slow in and slow out'.
It took me a while to get to grips with the graph editor as I have very little experience with Maya at the moment, but I still found experimenting very fun and found that I was able to improve my work fairly easily through trial and error. Working in my own time I was successfully able to animate the bouncing ball but have not yet had a chance to apply rotations and squashing/stretching effects to it, but this is something I will be continuing and improving on into the next week.
