Week 8 - Starting Animation

The first part of animation is one of the hardest but once it has been completed for the first time it can be looped and sped up or slowed down to make the effect more realistic.

The undercarriage and wheels are the most important part of the animation as there are so many moving parts to it but the main area I focused on was the coupling rod and bar and modelled the animation around this part.Firstly I select the "AutoKey" box so that any movement is recorded onto the timeline at the bottom of the screen. The main idea I had to make the movement smoother and more effective was to create each autokey on the 15th frame so it starts at 0 then 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90 etc.

To begin animating I selected the main parts such as the coupling rod, the joiners such as the front rod and the back rod that connects all of the wheels together. I then moved them in a circular motion around the wheel trying to keep the same area of the wheel as the beggining of the animation. As I moved the main coupling rod I rotated it slightly so that it has the effect of movement.
I repeated the same technique to make a full 360 movement around the wheel with the effect of the coupling rod moving with it.
Once I had made the full 360 movement around the wheel it was time to copy the keyframes and paste them into the timeline ahead of the point so that it was a repeated motion like a loop.
The next step was to make the attached rod move with the coupling rod connector, this was very time consuming as when I keyframed every 15th the same as the coupling rod, and all the connectors but it kept glitching and kept going out of the area it should have been so I had to individually keyframe sections when it did glitch so that it was a smooth movement from start to finish. As the screenshot shows there are alot of keyframes for it!
The next step was to animate all of the joiners and connections from the rods already animated, this made it easier to animate as all of the other sections had been animated so I could move them using the select and rotate tool and move the points to move with the previous animations.
The pistons were quite difficult to manipulate but once I had watched some videos it was easier to animate as it just moves from left to right down the slider. To animate I moved it by the same technique as before on every 15th frame so that the movement was smooth and in time with the other movements.
The last section of main movement was the bars around the piston the top moves up and down so this was easy to animate using the rotate tool I moved them every 15th frame.
The same was for the right bar as it moved left and right I had to select and move it and select and rotate it to make the positions right on every 15th frame.
The bottom bar moves to the left and right and up and down as it connects to the middle and right bars. To animate them I selected each 15th frame and moved them in the directions they needed to move to connect to the right and middle bars.
The last bar to animate was the middle one that joins onto the piston and the bottom bar, this was easy to animate as all it needed to do was follow the movement of the piston and rotate to connect to the bottom bar.
The last area that needed animating was the wheels, to do this I select all of the wheels and on each 15th frame I selected and rotated to the angle of 30 degrees so that it moved at the same rate of the bars and rods.
Here is the animation so far, there are a few little glitches on the movement of the rod above the coupling rod, this should hopefully be changed by thursdays presentation so that I can show a good animated train.