Cube Jump Tutorial

Another animation tutorial... For this one, the assignment was to animate a cube jumping from one platform to another, showing anticipation and squash/stretch. My cube is a SubD model, and I created clusters out of the top, middle, and bottom verts so I could easily scale and rotate them together.

I'd say my biggest challenge was getting the bounces to look fluid, while at the same time keeping the bottom of the box from sliding. I probably could have used IK for this, but instead I keyed the bottom cluster's position every frame to match the lateral translation. Bleh, so tedious. Note to self: learn more about rigging!

If I take another pass at this, I'll add some twist about the cube's spine, and polish the squash/stretch during the final jump. But for now, I'm tired of bouncing cubes.