Assignment 1 :: Bouncing Ball

Assignment 1: Ball Bounce from randolfd and Vimeo.

In this assignment, I skipped the first task of animating a bouncing ball in 24 frames and it ended up shooting me in the foot. I tried to do a 450 frame animation of the ball, bouncing in and being excited caused him to jot in and out of the frame 3 times. Afterwards, he was supposed to slowly come in and deflate to represent an exhaustive state. The task was too much. I had not felt warmed up. I'm sure I could tweak the animation I completed, but it might be best to just start again. Doing the single ball bounce in 24 frames is a nice ease into the remaining assignments. I just completed it and I feel much better now. I will return to this assignment once I have a better idea/concept.

Below are some common mistakes and fixes made by other students in the class:

1. Stretch of ball on descent happens too early.
2. Incorrect contact with the ground plane.
3. Add an extra frame of squash, keep it here at least two and at the most three.
4. Punch or Pop occurs after squash. The distance between the stretch and the last frame of the squash should be greater than the distance between the first squash and stretch frames.
5. Tops stop too abruptly. Flatten out tangents.
6. More keyframes at the top of the motion than at the bottom.
7. Be mindful of the frame count and height. If the height is shallow and there are a lot of frames, the animation will play slow.
8. Practice flat and linear keys.
9. Keep things simple. Plan your keys (70%). Animation = 30%.
10. Cameron Myazake bouncing ball animation.
11. Check out Richard William's tips on frame count.
12. Soft landings. Create linear tangents to create impact.