With my earphone animation idea, I had a hard time finding a way to give the wires the ability to move fluidly. Eventually, I found a method that allowed me to model them in a way that allowed me to use the vertices of an EP curve to animate the wire.
First, I went to Create > Curve Tools > EP Curve Tool and drew an EP curve by clicking and dragging. Wherever you click, a new vertex is created.
Then, I created a cylinder, went to the Channel Box, changed the subdivision caps to 0 and deleted all faces apart from the top of the cylinder. Then I flipped it so that the inside was now facing outwards.
Holding C, I dragged the circle to the EP curve to snap it on.
After this, I selected the underside face of the circle and the curve before pressing CMD + E to extrude. I then increased the divisions to make the cylinder smooth and fit to the shape of the EP curve.
This, however, would mean that I would have to animate using the single vertices as separate objects and so all of the keyframes for movement would be on different timelines which would make it hard for me to animate the vertices together. With little time left, I found that I wasn’t able to find an alternative way to animate the wire that was suited to my basic knowledge of Maya.
To ensure that I have an animation to submit, I changed my idea to animate a pencil eraser instead as it is a basic shape but is still something that I can make into an interesting character.
Jasmine Cooper 