Shop Door Opening
I modelled a shop with a window and door in Maya. I knew I wanted to animate the door opening. To start with I tried doing this using bone animation, but the door kept distorting. In the end I decided that using bone animation complicated things a little bit too much for this particular animation and finished the door animation without using bones instead. That worked a lot better.
I also wanted to add a shopkeeper's bell to the shop. To do this I first created the bell, making the bell, the ringer and the wall attachment all separately. After sizing all the pieces down and placing them correctly, I went about animating the bell. I animated the main part of the bell first, using bone animation I made it swing from side to side. I was careful to time the bell swinging with the door moving, so that the bell would start moving when the door was where it would affect the bell. I start it with bigger swings when it starts moving and then decrease the angle that it swings at until it comes to a stop. Then I animated it again when the door closed too.
After animating the main part of the bell, I started to animate the inside ringer in the bell using the same method. I animated the ringer moving with the bell, but when I watched the animation, I found that it looked very unnatural. I found a video of the inside of a bell while it was ringing so I could see how the ringer moved while the bell was ringing. Using this as a reference, I re-animated the ringer and made the movement look a lot more natural. The ringer doesn't actually need to move very much compared the main part of the bell and when it hits the bell, it always hits the opposite side from where the bell has just swung.
This is the bell video that I used as a reference.
This is a video of my shop asset. The door opens and closes and the bell rings at the appropriate times. I am happy with this animation, but I think the bell still looks a little bit stiff, maybe moving the bell in a bigger variety of directions would make it look better. However, I am going to use this asset in my game and am still proud of how it came out.