Making the hammer throw animation

In this segment I am going to create hammer throw animations. As a first step we need to look at real life hammer throw. http://youtu.be/C4_b9afHJqE By looking at this you can see they start by swinging the hammer at great force above their heads to build lots of memento and then spin in order to build more force before they throw it. Here is one in slow motion http://youtu.be/wvDoVZ0PosY even in slow motion it looks complicated.

Before creating the hammer throw I began researching by looking at lots of different clips of people performing the hammer throw, in order to get the idea of how it works. The idea is to swing the hammer by the handle around the body, using the heavy end to help build momentum, and then spin the hammer around using your body, so the force builds up in order to make it travel far when you release it. I found a useful way to make the hammer throw was to get a clip on “YouTube” pause it and use print screen to get an image, and keep repeating this

  

The example here shows how I got my key frame images

To start my animation I decided that it should have a spin at the beginning to look like the momentum got the hammer going.

The next part was to swing the hammer around the head a few time, this part took a lot of correcting but when solved, I was able to copy the frames though I still had to correct a bit.

Next was creating the spin, this was the easy part and took up most of the animations length.  I copy frames around, but I made the frames closer together each time, to show the momentum was building up.

The final part was letting go of the hammer. It was fairly straight forward and wasn’t too difficult.  

Here is the resulting animation:

I enjoyed doing this project; however, although I thought the result was satisfactory for me, what I would like to do is spend more time on the facial expressions like struggling to lift the hammer and concentrating on spinning it, to make it appear more human. Also I should have made the hammer look more fluid as it seemed kind of blocky. I also feel I should have spent more time on the animation around releasing the hammer. The main reasons why I didn’t do these things was that I was busy with other work, and I didn’t have enough time to perfect the animation to a point where I was completely satisfied with it.