Advanced Animation - Exercises

24.9.2024 - ______ (Week 1 - Week __)
Vanessa Kei Kurniadi / 0360525
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Advanced Animation - Exercises

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INSTRUCTION

Exercise 1: Bouncing Ball

In this exercise we were instructed to make a bouncing ball animation for several types of ball: Soccer ball, ping pong ball, bowling ball, and beach ball. For week 3 deadline, we're only instructed to make a solid non-stretch ball since the squash-and-stretch ball is gonna be taught in week 3's class.

First off we were taught the basics, including how we can apply a bone structure to move a shape to it's desired form. This technique will be useful when we need to apply complicated forms like a full body character.

fig 1.1 applying bone to a shape

Now we proceeded to learn how to make a basic bouncing ball animation. In class, we were taught step by step on how to make a soccer ball bounce animation.

PROCESS

Soccer:

First, we need to determine the location of the camera and how wide the view is. Then we set the initial position of the ball to the top left area (keep in mind to leave the 4 direction arrow at the bottom and use the outer ring. For some reason, the axis are messed up, making it hard to animate when we're focusing on the axis). Use "K" key, and set a keyframe on the location of ball in frame 1.

Second, drag the ball to the floor/base, and make another keyframe in the selected frame (in my case, it is frame 14). Then the final animation will be the ball moving in a straight diagonal line.

This is where we need to go to the graph editor to edit the graph, making some sort of arc going down. Then update the path to see the changes. The graph will affect the ball to make a more natural fall.

Then move the ball to it's next peak position after the bounce, and add a keyframe on the selected frame again, and edit the frame again. Note that just like other arcs in Illustrator or Photoshop, the arcs in the graph will change when we tried to pull one end of the anchor. To fix it, right click on the anchor and set the anchor to "free", so it won't affect the other arc.

Repeat the process several time and keep updating the process to make other bounce, and at the end, make the ball roll on the ground off the camera.

When the bounce is ready, all that is left is to make the rotation to make the rolling animation.

I asked Mr Kamal and what he recommended was to make a constant rotation from the start till the end of the bounce, and then make the rotation a bit slower when the ball was only rolling at the end. So the keyframe was essentially done in the start of the bounce, the end of the bounce, and the end of the roll.

(Most of the process are done in class, and since I am trying to keep up with the tutorial, I don't have much process footage of the animating process)

fig 1.2 Making the soccer ball bouncing animation

Ping Pong:

(I decided to make separate files for each of my animation because for some reason the "rig UI" seems to disappear at some point.)

I had to watch the ping pong bounce tempo so many times to get the feeling of how fast the ball is. A ping pong ball's bounce is more sharp and fast compared to the soccer ball. In addition, the difference of peak height for each bounce are more subtle than the soccer ball, making it bounce a lot more before rolling flat on the ground.

fig 1.3 Making the ping pong bounce

1.4 Making the ping pong rotation

Bowling:

Beach Ball

FEEDBACK

Week 1

• Update your Blender app

Week 2

• I think the ball is a bit slow at the start. You can look for references and then adjust the timing of the bouncing.
• For the rolling, you can just set it at the start and the end of the bouncing animation, and then when the ball is rolling, you can make it a bit slower.