Just a quick bit of animation here. I'm not pleased with the turn, I didn't think about the inbetweens as much as I should have so the spin looks kinda odd. I'm more happy with the actual run though.
I tried to follow this tutorial to create a CG Tornado. I'm still trying to replicate the effect in the video but outside of the tutorial I had a play with the Expression editor and things I had seen in the video to create this: Its very rough around the edges. I wont carry on anymore with this scene file, I'll go back and watch the Tutorial over and over until I can get a good grasp of it. Doing this has given me another idea for possibly a more simple smoke effect that doesn't use particles
Having completed my game of life script I wanted to get a nice render of it, which I've finally gotten around too. I wanted to make a grid of marbles, each different colours, however having around 2000 in total in the scene that was not gonna happen by assigning them manually. After a lot of trial and error I found a way to get what I wanted. First I created a procedural texture of squares, each different colours from the 6 base colours I chose. I then positioned this under the spheres. I gave every sphere a completely see through glass material, and disabled primary viability of the plane. This meant the refracted colour of the plane could be seen in the marbles but not the marbles themselves. I think this worked pretty well, definitely more efficient than assigning all the objects a material.
This is an update on the Bouncing Ball animation. I animated him jumping up a spiral staircase and over 2 gaps, finally getting squished. I tried to focus lots on the movement on the tail and giving the end of the tail delay so it swished behind the ball quite nicely. I spent a lot of time in the Dope sheet moving frames around to tweak the animation. I still don't think its showing enough personality, the ball is just bouncing through the scene, I would like to make him more of a quirky character who shows some emotion.