My Laziness Quotient

When I was a kid, Mad Magazine defined the Laziness Quotient as something like "the amount of work you do to avoid having to do work." This little clip reminds me of that definition.

One of my characters is a piñata. He gets yanked around a lot and the candy inside him needs to jiggle around. Rather than actually animate all of the little bits of candy, I tried to figure out a way to automate all the secondary action. My solution was to use Maya's jiggle deformers to get the candy to bounce around. I still have to animate the containing mass to follow the body, but it's less work than animating each little candy separately. At least I think it is.

If any Flash experts out there are reading this, and know of a way to make collision detection work within a boundary shape, and also how to make actionscript results renderable, please drop me a line. If I can keep this all within Flash, I'd be much less lazy.

Note how the character animation is pencil line. This test was done early on, about three years ago, when I was still drawing everything on paper.