Assignment 2 Animation

Firstly, like in the previous exercise, I linked the joints of the crane arm together so that everything will move together when moved/ rotated (of course, the parent constraints also play a part in setting everything in position when the animation is made).

In this screenshot, the crane arm is supposed to pick up the first green box and then move it to the rectangle platform on the left. To be able to accomplish this animation, I first parented the box and the platform to fix the initial position of the box so that the box would not be appearing at any part of the maya 'world' instead 

Here, the arm is picking up the second green box. Before the arm picks up the second box, I parent constrainted the platform with the box and the arm with the box so it will be easy for me to set the pick up and release of the box. At the frame when the box is stacked on the first one, I set the rest position of the box so it will not appear anywhere in the maya world and will stay at its final position.

For this part of the animation, the box sees the red box. I wanted to make the initial reaction of the crane arm to be shock, as there is a red box among the green boxes. Then the arm will go to the other remaining green box and the first two green boxes to check the colour of them. After checking the stack, the arm will give a sigh and look back at the red box and to the stack, thinking what to do about the red box. This part of the animation is done purely by setting keyframes on the arm control and the base. No parenting or sort was needed here.

At this point, a sudden idea will pop into the crane arm and it will move the red box onto the other platform, separating from the other green boxes. Parenting(constraint) of the platform and box, crane arm and box was needed to complete this part. And the constraints were all done at the frame where the crane arm comes in contact to pick up the red box.

The only remaining thing for the crane arm to do here would be to stack the remaining green box on the stack of green boxes. After stacking the final box, the arm will return to a 'hibernation' mode. Like the other parts of the animation. I only used parent constraining(where armcontrol constrain was 1 and platform constrain was at 0) at the frame where the box was picked up. After stacking the box, I set the rest position of the box so that it will not move elsewhere after all the animation has been done. After that, the remaining part of the animation left was to make the crane arm go back to its original position. And so I set the keyframes of the arm control and base again in order to complete this animation.

Final animation output