3D JUMPING CUBE

Task: Using Cinema-4D, animate a jumping cube.
Use the basic principles of animation to give the cube as much realism as possible.
Texture the mesh and Light up the scene and render the whole into a video and/or GIF.


I approached this 3D animation quite similarly to the way I did with the 2D bouncing ball task, where I planned the animation through and then refined it as I went.

I first animated the cube  going up and back down.



and added squash and stretch to it so I could squash it down as a if it was preparing to jump and then squeezed it horizontally and elongate it as it went up to show it was moving fast and the bottom of its body had a small delay to indicate weight.

              








Then, as it reached the top I made it so the bottom of the cube would squish towards the top making the cube look fatter on the sides, this is a simple trick to show the cube has reached its maximum altitude and it has now reached gravity 0 for a small period of time. I then added a frame where the cube would come back to it's original form only to repeat the animation in reverse to show the cube falling.

Finally, I animated the cube squashing and stretching, sort of like a breathing animation to show the cube was releasing the bit of force it still had from the impact, also showing that it is fairly  flexible almost as if made of jelly; added the basic texture and lighted with a basic white light and used the timeline curve editor to adjust the time of each action before rendering the whole in 30 fps.

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