The Cannon Balls

In order for any tank to be effective (bar squashing things) it must have weapons, in this case cannon balls. I decided to place the cannon balls in position from the start of the animation, save having to move them with the tank. In a later blog I will describe how I made them invisible until they were needed.
To position the cannon balls effectively, I moved up the tank to the point where it is about to fire.
I then created the cannon balls from basic sphere shapes and textured them in the same way previously explained.
I then moved them into the cannon mouth so they appear to be coming from within them when the tank fires.
Then came the task of animating them so that they actually hit their intended targets. To do this I drew in some simple lines from the positioned straw men back to the tank, this gave me an idea of which can should fire at which target. This allowed me to also fine tune the cannon balls' initial position within the cannon.
I then used the Set Key tool to move the cannon balls to their targets and then to land on the floor.
Simple but effective.