Not every experiment from that job was a pharmacy animation. Dr. Bongsup Cho’s grant-funded program gave me a reason to get much deeper into Maya, and this catapult was one of my technical studies: a quick way to understand rigid bodies, constraints, gravity, springs, and camera parenting before applying those skills to harder visualization problems.
Why I made this
Dynamics tools can be difficult to learn from definitions alone. ‘Rigid body,’ ‘constraint,’ and ‘spring’ describe parts, but the useful understanding comes from watching those parts interact in a working scene.
A catapult is a good teaching object because the behavior is easy to read. If the setup works, the viewer can see the force, pivot, release, and camera relationship immediately.
What I did
I assembled active and passive rigid bodies, a pin constraint, gravity, and springs into one compact test. I also used a parented camera so the presentation followed the action instead of leaving the result hard to read.
The short format keeps the focus on system behavior. It shows enough of the real Maya workflow to make the experiment credible without turning a quick technical demonstration into a full course.
A note on the archive
I had remembered this as the EnVision Lab, but URI’s records place the College of Pharmacy and its 3-D visualization auditorium in Fogarty Hall at the time. The university now describes the work as its 3D Animation Program, established in 2003 with support from the Champlin Foundations.
URI credits Professor Bongsup Cho, Professor Marian Goldsmith, and Roy Bergstrom as collaborators, with students providing technical support through the Student Technology Assistant program. The work around that program also took me to the 2007 Gordon Research Conference on Visualization in Science and Education at Bryant University. I was still an undergraduate, and it was my first Gordon Research Conference.
This catapult was a skills experiment from that environment, not a biomedical deliverable. The software interface and recommended Maya workflows have also changed, so current implementation should start with current Autodesk documentation.