Issues

It was a simple enough task to scale and transform all of the objects so as they would interact with each other perfectly, but one thing that I had overlooked were the books that would topple over one another.

As is visible here, there are a wide variety of books of different colours. That is, three rows. This would have been unnecessary in the final animation as it would have prolonged it. As an alternative I decided that I could convey the same message with a lesser number of books. The domino effect would remain and the same result would be achieved in a shorter amount of time. I changed it to something like this:

Another reason for altering this section was because I did not want to mess with the flow of the overall domino effect. What I mean is, in the part of the animation before the books begin to topple, the ball rolls down a coiled path. The ball rolls at a slow pace before it builds up the momentum necessary to be able to knock down the first book and look convincing. Two slow sections back to back would bore audiences, and thus it was in the best interest to speed things up.

Regarding the original books being multi-coloured and the replacements being only red, the reason for that is because upon separating the polygons for texturing in the original set, they would move off in different directions when rotated, and thus couldn’t be animated. I tried for several hours to fix the problem but to no avail, and decided to start over. In the course of my frustration I opted to duplicate an existing book that I had previously modelled that was laying on the table. There were no problems with that, I don’t know why.