This week we started moving away from the fundamentals and began to touch on animation. To start with, we were told to animate 3 different weighted balls bouncing and given advice to animate a bowling ball, tennis ball and a ping pong ball as they vary greatly in weight, giving each their own unique bounce.
I did my animation on my iPad in Procreate, using the animation tool to enable onion skin and to be able to play back my animation so as to edit the frames. During this task i found that each ball varied greatly in number of bounces, movement and the time it took to fall. The heavier balls were quicker to hit the ground and the heavier the ball, the less bounce it had though it did still actually bounce. The lighter balls were a lot more sporadic in their bounces, for example the ping pong ball went crazy whereas the tennis ball was more controlled in its movement.
I found the bowling ball and tennis ball easy enough to animate but I couldn’t get the ping pong ball to look right so i thought it would’ve suited a more lively appearance and gave it a tail, making it seem like the ball was alive and actually hopping forward to move.
I looked up a reference for each ball on YouTube, and surprisingly there’s quite a lot of people who upload references just for animators to follow, which I really appreciate.
Below is my animation.