Bouncing Ball Tutorial

The first tutorial that we were asked to complete was the bouncing ball tutorial in the Learning Maya book. After a rough start, this was the final result. Due to the book being outdated, there are some glitches in the final product, but overall the animation came out as it was intended.

This screen shot shows the unrendered view in the perspective window. As you can see, a spotlight ahs been setup to highlight the ball's bounce through the hoop. Once the animation is rendered, the flames will no longer be green (they will look like actual flames). The main problem I have experienced was that in the final render the ring was not showing up. When I deleted the ring to start over, the flames disappeared in the render so I decided to undo the delete. I figure this minor problem has to do with the book not matching the program. Either way the ball still bounces through a ring of fire. 

Professor Sanders requested that we complete the tutorial and change one thing. I decided to continue with the part of the tutorial that we didn't cover in class. This part was creating the particles. After the ball has made it through the hoop, some fire particles are supposed to attach themselves to the ball and quickly fall to the tiled floor. This process began with adding friction (geoConnector), creating a particle event, and messing around with the settings (changing number of particles, velocity, and spread). The gravity fields allowed the particles to drop faster to the ground and the render attributes allowed me to change the shape to a streak.