Bouncing Ball Exercise

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This was the first week properly animating, with (blue) pencil and paper. It's been hard and fun at the same time. I have created 3 different animations for balls of varying weight and motion. None of them were without problems, but I didn't find any serious fault or something tragically wrong. The purpose of these exercises was to learn and practice the 12 principles of animation, as well as getting a good 'feel' of animating weighted objects.

Beach Ball

The first  ball I animated was a beach ball. The key points to this kind of ball is that it is very light (in comparison to other types of balls), it doesn't squash and stretch much (if at all) and is not a perfect sphere - so it can wobble as it comes to a complete stop, finding its centre of gravity.

My only real trouble with the beach ball was that I had too many frames near the peak of each of bounce, so the ball floated in the air longer than it should have. I feel that the stop is a little to abrupt with the wobble and could use more unbetweens, but I left it alone to work on the other exercises.

Bowling Ball

My first attempt at the bowling ball had the weight but lacked any anticipation, it stopped too suddenly, and it fell too far from the edge of the cliff. I didn't think that it's trajectory was bad but after I redraw half of the animation and added a bunch more frames, to both ends, I can see why I was advised to change it.

This was also a little personal test to see if I could animate the spin of the ball. I found that it wasn't too hard, but I did get a bit sloppy and make a few mistakes when drawing the stop sequence, as it looked like it rotated on the spot. That was been removed and I am happy with the end result.

Football

Probably the harder one of the three. The football is flexible so it will squash and stretch but it also hard and fairly weighted so it loses momentum pretty quickly (depending on the surface it is in contact to). In this exercise I made the ball too squashy (it squashed and stretched on the second bounce, and a little on the third). I thought it looked fine but after I drew it more rounded (because I was advised to do so) it just gained more weight and solidarity. That made for a better animation. I also made the ball come to a stop too quickly, (seeing a pattern?) so I had to animate quite a few more frames in, maybe about 10-20.

To make the exercise even harder, we had to animate the football bouncing across 3 stages. This wasn't the problem. The problem came during the linetest when the animation was played back. I found that as the ball flew off of the right side of the stage, it looked as if it had teleported back to the left side of the stage. The way I solved this was by inserting blank frames between each stage: (5 for the first transition and 3 for the next). This gives the viewers enough time to catch up with what's happening and it looks as if the ball has entered another stage through one continous motion, as opposed to telporting back as it got to the edge of the stage.

Hope you learned something! :) If you haven't, just know that blue pencils are awesome!