Introducing Maya® 2011

Animating with Dynamics: The Pool Table

This exercise will take you through the creation of a scene in which you’ll use dynamics to animate a cue ball striking two balls on a pool table.

Creating the Pool Table and the Balls

You’ll create a simple pool table as a collision surface for the pool balls. To create the table, follow these steps:

1. Create a polygonal plane for the surface of the table. Scale it to 10 along its height and length.

2. To create the pocket holes, make two holes in opposite corners. The easiest way is to duplicate the tabletop plane and offset it slightly in both directions, as shown in Figure 12-3. Doing so creates a pair of square holes in the corners for the ball to drop through. For this exercise, it will do perfectly ...