Joanna Leidy

David King

Objective:  For project 2, we had to design a juggling club and animate 3 of them so that they move in a potentially realistic juggling pattern using Maya.

We began by modeling the juggling club.  To do this, we designed a curve using the EP Curve Tool in Maya along the z-axis.  

We then used the Revolve Tool to revolve this curve about the z-axis to create the juggling club 3 dimensional shape.

Next, we created a curve for the motion path using the CV Curve Tool.  We created one “mountain” curve, copied it, and flipped it along the y-axis, offsetting it slightly to get both the path from the left hand to the right hand and from the right hand to the left hand.  We then connected the curves at the bottom smoothly to simulate the motion path of a juggler’s hands.  We then tweaked the curve by hand to smooth it out more.

We then set the juggling club’s motion path to the curve we created.  The club’s velocity was set on the motion path by setting the tangent vector to the velocity for each key frame.  We then key framed the rotations of the club to behave as much like a real juggling club as possible.

The green dot in the above picture displays where we arbitrarily chose the center of mass to be of the club.

Next, we wrote a MEL script to duplicate the keys for 10 rotations of the club.  To get three juggling clubs, we duplicated the juggling club 3 times and offset their starting times.  Color was added to the clubs using Phong material.  Then we added a camera to go 360 degrees around the entire animation.  We set motion blur through rendering options in Maya.