Bucket Model

At first when I tried to make this bucket I used curves and tried the revolve function, which worked perfectly well in creating a soft, vase-type shape, but no matter how much I tweaked it I couldn't get the hard edge that I needed for my metal bucket. So in the end I remade it completely using polygons which I think created at more solid look. The bucket is basically a polygon pipe which I scaled up at the top to make it wider than the bottom. I then made a flat-ish cylinder for the base and two torus' for the rings and the top and bottom on the bucket. The handle is an extruded curve and the hook-holes were make using booleans-difference. Lastly I added the Blinn texture to make it look metallic. I'm quite pleased with how this model turned out.

Here's the image I used as a reference:

Door Model

Here's the door to the garage that will start off my animation. (Its supposed to be the back/side door rather than the big slider doors that you usually get at the front of garages for the cars to drive through.) I modelled it using both my door in my bedroom (for the handle and door frame), and the my actually garage door back home (for the door panels) as references. I originally intended for there to be a glass window in the top panel, but even after searching online and trying out a tutorial, I still couldn't make a decent pane of glass. In the end I decided to just stick with a plain door since glass will probably take a long time to render and I fear my laptop wouldn't be able to cope with it if I'm forced to render my animation from home.

The door its self was made simply by adding sub-divisions to a cuboid and then selecting the faces I wanted to extrude inwards to create the panels. The frame was made using two separate cuboids and the booleans-difference effect to cut out the door shape so the door can be animated swinging open. I added bevels to the door and frame to make them appear smoother, as well as some textures since I haven't tried playing around with them much before. I wasn't really sure which textures to use so I went with Lambert for the door and frame. The door handle is Blinn since that looks more metallic, and was made by extruding a circle around a curve. I took a photo of the handle on my bedroom door to use as a reference:

Camera Test

We were taught how to set up and animate cameras in Maya in class, so I decided to do a test for practise since I'll need to used cameras a lot for my final piece. I was trying to get the camera to follow the ball down the spiral and then move underneath, but I found it difficult to keep the ball in sight of the camera, so I'm not sure how well it works... the camera may sweep too much at the end. I'll practise more with cameras after I've completed modelling.

Animatic

This is my storyboard/animatic for my domino effect idea. In the end I decided to go for the garage/garden shed theme where opening the door triggers off a chain reaction to switch on the light. Unfortunately there aren't any sound effects in the animatic because I'm having trouble downloading them from the Internet, so for now I've just left them out so I can can get a feel for the timing. The timing will probably change as I start animating as right now this is just a rough estimation.

Pendulum Swing

In class we were taught how to use and animate joints to swing like a pendulum, so here's my quick animation test. After key framing each joint I used the graph editor to make the joints fall faster in between the high points of the swing to give it more weight.

Spiral Motion Path

Since I want to have a ball roll down spiral rails in my animation, I did a short test using a motion path to see how it would work. First I made two spirals using the same method as before, then scaled the second one down so it fit inside the first to create the tracks for the ball to roll down. The ball is a simple nurbs sphere that I attached to the motion path and assigned the blinn material to make it appear metal. I made the path itself by selecting one of the spirals, changing it to Isoparm, then duplicating a surface curve. I scaled the curve so it fit between the two 'tracks' correctly and positioned it and the ball slightly above the spirals so the ball appears to roll along them.

Despite how simple the process sounds, I actually found it quite difficult to get everything looking right, especially since the ball always rolled down far too fast and at a constant speed, which didn't look very realistic. I added more frames to the timeline to slow the ball down, then used the graph editor to level out the speed of the ball at the top of the spirals. This made the ball start off rolling slower, then appear to gather speed on its way down. Its still not perfect, but so far I'm quite pleased with the result. I think perhaps the ball still needs to roll a little slower...

Spiral Bounce

I made the spiral by creating a straight vertical path with a circle curve at the base. I then selected them both and extruded the circle the create a cylinder, then rotated it 3600 degrees and scaled the circle down to make the spiral. For the animation test I used the same method as the ball; key framing then scaling to add squash and stretch, then adjusting the timing using the graph editor. But despite my adjustments, I still think it looks rather weightless... I think it needs to fall quicker. I'll try to amend this later.