After I finished the rig I wanted to play a bit with it. So I chose to pause the tutorial for one blog post. I animated the spider ball with the intention of showing off most of its features. I went back to the basics and animated a bouncing ball. I tried using the feature of blender to simulate a bounce with the interpolation method. However, it caused more problems than it helped. It never had contact with the ground except at the end and you could not manually adjust the height. Since it is an interpolation type it would generate the bounce between the new keyframes again and destroy the intended bounce. So I switched back to manually animating it. I went with switching the interpolation to stepped in the beginning – something we were taught in the bachelor to do. It is a lot easier to get the timing right with the stepped mode. I started with only animating the the x and y direction. Then I added the spin and at the end the squash and stretch.
As for the other movements I wanted to show off the head and the possibility of moving it like BB8 in Star Wars. So the ball rolls in, looks at the cam and rolls out again.
Last but not least I let my buddy show his full pride. He is all grown up ready for anything with its handguns.
It is a very quick animation and I normally would go over it again several times but as I only wanted it to show off its capability I am happy with the little showcase I created. The only thing I think the rig is missing, are some sort of eye lids or shutter for the head. You could immediatly create more emotions by adding them.
