After we had finished with our pendulum animations, we went onto creating a segmented pendulum. To start out, I made the pendulum swing in the same way as I had my original one, by selecting the components, adjusting the position of the objects and setting keyframes. This looked fine and the animation was just as smooth as the first, but it didn't look realistic. The objects moved in a way that was too uniform as there was no overlapping action with the balls that were lower down in the line.
To create the overlapping action I opened up the graphs for the movement of each of the objects, and shifted the motion path along. This meant that they would move at the same speed, but the balls at the bottom of the pendulum would hang a bit later than the ones further up, creating a more realistic pendulum swing. This looked a lot smoother when played back, but because the motion paths were no longer occurring at the same time, if the video was looped it was no longer continuous. Instead it jittered just as the video started again.
Motion Graph After I Adjusted the Infinity Curves
I could have left the animation as it was, as it played through fine, but it really bothered me that it wasn't smooth when it was looped, and you could clearly see when the video started again. So I looked at the graphs for the motion of the objects, particularly the infinity curves. If a video is going to loop perfectly then the curve will be smooth throughout and the keyframes at the start and the end of the sequence will line up with the infinity curve, which wasn't the case when I'd finished my animation. To adjust this, I added keyframes on the infinity curve and deleted the start keyframe, then altered the tangents of the curve, so that it was smooth, as shown above.
Finished Segmented Pendulum Swing
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