chess isn't the only game

Since we've gotten a lot of chess lately, I got curious about other board games we could potentially animate– for us non-chess players. Someone in class mentioned checkers which would obviously be quite simple but I recalled the Rube Goldberg machine someone posted a few weeks ago and Moustrap (a childhood favorite) came to mind. Apparently, I wasn't the first with this idea... another Maya-user had the same idea

As I watched this video, I looked closely at each element of the contraption and though about the different shapes I would use if I were animating this. From the slides, to the windy things, to the marble, everything seems to be made of pretty basic polygons and curves. I then looked around my room at different objects and tried to break them down into basic shapes. For pretty much everything besides my stuffed giraffe, purses and clothes it's not too difficult. Using this break-it-down technique makes the animating process less overwhelming and would have saved me lots of time on my rook!