Noroff fagskole: A2 - Intro to animation 02

This week at Noroff, I am making an animation of a "robot-claw". The task is to animate the "hand/claw" picking up a ball and throwing it away.

Time-budget

Reference

For reference, I drew 20 pictures of what I imagined the claw would do.

In my case, I wanted it to be busy with something, then get the attention of a ball rolling into the scene. The robot-claw would then try to reach it, but would figure out that it is too short to reach it.

It decides to try a jump, and fails.

Then it would drag itself towards the ball, where it would finally pick it up, and throw it away. 

Work

I started the work by figuring out all of the movements 

and different techniques I could use for my scene.

In my outliner, you can see the different objects and such in my scene.

 Here is my scene. I have a small box (which acts as the interest for the claw before the ball arrives)

The robot claw itself. This was not made by me.

A ball (also not made by me)

A background scene and finally a shot-cam.

In my animation, I had a bit where the claw would drag itself along the ground to make it's way to the ball. With traditional animation, that is quite hard. Instead of animating it forward, I simply animated the movements, then animated all the other objects in the scene (including the camera) backwards, making it seem like the robot claw was moving forward. (Of course I didn't just move the camera and the objects backward, I needed precise keys to make it seem natural.

Details on that:

I placed a simple object in front of the end of the claw. As the claw moved backwards, I keyed the simple object to match the movements. As I had these keys, I simply copied them and pasted them to the different objects and the camera.

With all of these movements that I wanted, I ended up with 1075 frames, resulting in a 44 second video.

Finished product

I am happy with the result. Some parts may look a bit weird, but I feel like the animation is the way I wanted it to be.

The part where the robot claw tries to jump, and fails, looks quite weird, but I wanted it to look like that because I didn't want it to look realistic

And hearing feedback from other students, that part was funny and nice, so I am definitely happy with it.