Animating in Maya: Overlapping Action

After we did the pendulum animation we then went on to doing the segmented pendulum. I did this by making the movements the same as the pendulum before, by selecting the components and adjusting the position of the object and then setting keyframes on the timeline. However, the segmented pendulum was looking too uniform and not realistic because it had no overlapping action on the balls lower down on the swing.

To create an overlapping action I had to open up the graph editor for the movements of the segmented pendulum, and shift the motion paths along one by one. This meant that they moved at the same speed but the balls nearer the bottom would swing later that the ones at the top of the swing.

I liked the look of my segmented pendulum swing and how smooth it was, but there is a bit of a pause when I start to loop the video. The reason for this is that I just need to go back and look at the graph editor and tweak some of the movements within the swing.