Week 6: Animation - deformers

Yesterday was about deformers in Maya, which can be used to create model or animate with. We were given the challenge to animate the cylinder below in a 'slinky' type move, not such a hard task at first glace. But we were not allowed to use any bones/skeleton or bend deformers. We had to animate groups of vertices (or 'clusters') individually to get the result. Clusters are actually what is going on 'behind the scenes' when you make a skeleton for your character and animate it, so it was the original way characters were animated (we were told) back in early days of CG. Trust me, that must have been a painful exercise to do whole character that way!

I guess they wanted us to learn this super hard way now just to get familiar with the tool/concepts. It was pretty tough to get that little sucker to deform as smoothly as with easier methods, but it's doing the slinky move anyhow..ha. Tedious but a good exercise I guess. Certainly know more about clusters than I ever wanted to...