MDU105.2 Animation

MDU105.2 Animation

The first things I animated were the palm trees, because I figured that after the board opened up, the trees would be the first things to pop up.

Using the curve editor, I smoothly sped up and slowed down certain parts of their bouncing to make the scene seem jubilant.

Initially I was going to have the trees stop bouncing before the chest landed, but that looked strange to me, so I extended their animations beyond that. I altered each tree individually in the curve editor so they would all seem more separate, and not look so... copied. I wanted it to seem as realistic in cartoon movement as possible. 


The chest was the next asset I animated, and I simply did it the way Steve showed us in the tutorial video. I didn't change it much because it was the most effective and entertaining way to animate the chest, from start to finish. Adjusting the stretching and squashing was very enjoyable, and I had a lot of fun messing around with overly exaggerated animations for everything in the beginning. 
There were no problems that I encountered when making the chest move, so everything in this part went very smoothly.

The coins were the next animation challenge. Each coin was animated one by one, from the beginning position in the chest all the way through to the final landing. I'm not sure if there was a more time-effective way to animate the coins, but I quickly learned that it wasn't possible to simply copy one coin, move it's position from the original, and hope that it would play through the same animation sequence in a different spot. When I did try to do this, the copy just merged with the original halfway through the jump, and landed in the exact same position. 

It's because of the time it took to animate that I wasn't able to create as many animated coins as I would have liked. However, I'm still very happy with the final product and of my efforts. 


I actually had some trouble when I first started to animate the coins, because I wanted the treasure chest to remain looking full, even after coins had spilled out of it. Therefore, I decided to set a base layer of coins on the inside of the chest, and a layer hovering slightly above it. 

The problem here was that I had completely rigged the inner coins to the chest at the start when I animated the chest, and only thought to create the separate jumping coins later on. This resulted in my coins just hovering above the board, in the position they'd be in if the chest hadn't moved from the board at all. So when I played through the animation sequence, as the chest hovers above the board and then drops down, the jumping coins are sitting there in the middle of the board, not doing anything until the chest lid opens.
I know that there was probably an easier way to sort this out, which would have seemed more logical, but I instantly thought to just have the jumping coins placed directly under the board until the chest landed, then move them up and let them resume their jumping out of the chest. 
I used this same 'under the board' method for the palm trees, crabs, shells, starfish and the grass placed on the board, and it has proven effective for my production. I'm happy with it like this.
Each coin has it's own bouncing animation upon touching the board for the first time, before settling flat on the surface. I felt that this made the animation a little bit more realistic. 

An extra little fun detail I added was to make two of the coins jump out of the chest, and hit the crabs on their heads, knocking them upside down. 

The final assets that I animated were the crabs, which were a lot of fun to move around because of their multiple moving points. It was entertaining to move their arms and pincers around to give them more life.
The only difficulty I had was that I had animated the two coins that hit the crabs before I animated the crabs getting to those positions at the time of impact, so it was a bit of meddling around that was required, in order to let the crabs dance and have fun before getting hit on the head.