For this assignment, I had to animate a swinging pendulum that was put in motion, and take that motion into account when making the arc of the pendulum's swings convincing. I ended up combining my scenario with a bit of knowledge carried over from the previous lesson. By attaching my pendulum to a ball that traveled on a rail, I could also showcase a bit of squash and stretch as the ball travels increasingly fast before colliding with the rail's end. (At one point, I was considering trying to add some stretch to the end of the pendulum as well, but I decided against it to save time.)
The fact that the object my pendulum was attached to didn't have a static shape introduced a lot of interesting questions. Where should I put the top end of the pendulum? Should the pendulum's string move vertically according to the squash and stretch as well? I ended up solving these problems by attaching the top part of the pendulum string to the center of the wire, and then erasing the parts that would cut through the wire or top on each frame. If you could view this scenario in 3 dimensions, maybe you could imagine the pendulum string coming from a hole underneath the wire clasp...
The actual process of animating the movement of the pendulum was relatively smooth, and a lot easier on the hands than the last assignment! Because of the structure of the assignment, I only needed to draw one line for the string and one circle for the bottom of the pendulum; every frame after that was just a matter of movement and rotation. It took a lot of fine tuning to get things to look good, and I ended up going back to adjust previous frames several times after rewatching it in motion, but I'm ultimately very happy with how this assignment came out.
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