In-Class Exercise 11 - Part 1

This exercise was to teach me about using Constraints to help create my animation. I set up a basic scene with 2 spheres and a cube in it, I then selected both the spheres and finally the cube and used a Point Constraint. This made it so that when I moved one of the spheres the cube would always move to be in the centre of the 2 spheres, I could see this coming in useful when I am setting up the cameras in my scene as I could have an object moving along a path and always have the camera moving along with it.

The next constraint type I used was the Aim Constraint, for this I added a sphere and a cylinder into my scene, selecting the sphere and then the cylinder I applied the aim constraint. This had the effect of whenever you moved the sphere the cylinder would rotate to always face the object. Initially though the wrong axis on the cylinder was trying to face the sphere simply changing the parameters on the constraint allowed me to change it to the correct axis. I will be using this tool for certain with my cameras as it will allow me to create a camera that will always focus on an object, overall this is a nice alternative to using the Camera and Aim.

The last constraint I decided to try out was the Parent Constraint, this is a simple tool that allows you to assign an object to another so that when the parent object is moved the child object will also move the same amount, the same goes for rotating and scaling. This tool will probably not be helpful for my animation as I feel as though it is much easier to use the Outliner to assign objects to each other.