In today’s animation session we studied the 12 principles of animation, where aspects of good animation were isolated and expanded upon. Today’s session was primarily focused on Squash and Stretch, Timing, Arcs and Weight. The goal was to create a realistic bouncing ball animation.
Maya’s motion trail feature made it easier to visualize the animation at a glance, more closely resembling the planning I did on paper.
By observing real life references, I was able to strengthen the knowledge I already had on the nature of a bouncing ball. George, our tutor, clarified that he was looking for a ball with the same or similar properties of a tennis ball.
In my initial experiment, I opted to create an animation where I used my knowledge of how balls have behaved in the past, interacting with an imperfect surface, having imperfect and erratic bounces and rotations. This was in order to attempt to expand on my animation experience, but proved somewhat challenging.
I then kept it simple (the miraculous KISS principle) and, by using knowledge garnered from references and other bouncing ball animations, created a simple yet effective short clip.
Adjusting curves and manually key-framing allowed for meticulous control over the animation, emphasizing the realistic feel I wanted to convey in this exercise. In the tutorial, we were encouraged to introduce rotation, with the ball spinning 180 degrees on each bounce, I thought this to be fairly unrealistic so I chose to have it rotate 90 degrees instead, but this was challenging due to the nature of the ball rig. It’s possible to do so, however, by stretching instead of squashing and vice versa, since the rig maintained its volume.
Bouncing Ball:
So, initially I followed instructions. I found a reference online and drew up a small plan.
- The X and Y axis were mapped out
- The X axis is essentially the number of frames, labeling the frame number at notable parts of the movement