Project 2: Animating Motion
for CS7496/CS4496, instructor Jarek Rossignac

Chris Alvarez (cristobal.alvarez)

William Blatt (gtg785r)

Purpose of the Project

In designing our animation, we elected to use Blender instead of Maya to create and animate our models.  We decided to use Blender for several reasons. Most important was the fact that Chris was already doing tutorials for Blender. The fact that Blender is free for download (compared with the far more expensive Maya software) was also a plus, since it gave us much more freedom in when and where we could work on our project outside of the College of Computing labs. While we both understand the importance of Maya experience in the graphics industry, neither of us have an immediate interest in learning Maya and we felt that the overall benefits of using Blender on this project outweighed those of attempting to learn Maya. Last, we wanted to give Blender's integrated game and physics engine a try, although we did not have enough time to do so.

The basis for our project's animation was to use path animation to determine the trayectory of the juggling pins, and key-framing for the orientations of the clubs. We used a video of some simple juggling tactics, then from that video determined the trajectory for the path and the orientations of the key-frames. We used an Open Source video editing tool called VirtualDub to decompose that video clip into a sequence of JPEG images. Thus, we were able to use the images as guides for keyframing and determining the path within Blender. This gave us what we feel is a very natural motion for the clubs. In fact, we were able to capture the deaccelerating twist of the hand to reduce the redirect the angular momentum of the pin as it hits the hand (if not, the centrifugal motion would make the pin fly out horizontally). The purpose of this hand twist is not trivial, and we felt the need to model it and include it.

It is important to mention that our first attempt at creating the animation was to simply use keyframes for both the trayectory and the rotation. This did not work since there is no easy way to make the tool interpolate a screw motion on a certain manner. We had to start over using a path trajectory.

We also added a body to our animation to enhance the realism of our video and to allow us to implement more of the animation principles effectively (such as anticipation and follow-through). It can be seen that each time the hand grabs a pin, there is a deacceleration (follow-through from the previous pin motion) and anticipation.

Further, we added motion blur to the last clip in this page.

The 3-second animation of a single club's motion can be downloaded here: Clip - Source

The endless loop of three club motion can be downloaded here: Clip - Source

The 10-loop animation of three club motion with camera pan can be downloaded here: Clip - Source