Target Impacts

After I had lined the cannon balls up so they actually went through the straw men, I then had to animate the straw men being hit and being knocked aside by the cannon ball.

Initially I wanted to use the Reactor for this effect but found that it was very difficult to get all the cannon balls hitting the straw men accurately. Instead I chose to manually animate them using the Set Key tool.

I went through the timeline to see the exact frame at which the cannon balls hit each target and started their motion from this point. Depending upon where they were hit I rotated and flipped the straw men accordingly.

This was more challenging than I initially thought as I had to guess how far back they would be moved by the force of the impact. Also, as I had wanted to make each cannon fire at slightly different times and the cannon balls move at various paces (reflecting inaccuracies in cannon technology) the animation of each straw man had to be tailored to their own specific impact.

Additionally, once doing the impacts I realised that that cannon balls stopped in mid-air which was not awfully realistic. This was rectified by adding in some key frames using the Set Key tool to make the ground their ending position.