In my head, when I conceptualized this GIF, it didn’t seem that challenging. Oh boy, was I wrong about that. For today’s letter, I decided to go with Mechanical.
On paper, it doesn’t seem that hard, it’s just a collection of gears moving. However, I set it up so that instead of having to animate everything individual, they all turn work just by spinning the handle, then I had to redo this a couple of times, because it was hard to tell what letter you were even looking at. Hence the nice beams sort of helping to sell the effect.
Lastly was the band around gears 3 and 4. That section alone took me a while, just to figure out exactly how to do it while also keeping it from distorting too much. Useful little skill to know, however, it seemed so specific a tool in Maya, I’m not entirely sure how to use it in another situation.
Guess I’ll need to make more belt scenes in the future.
Final Product
Behind the Scenes