To build on our class workshop we had to animate different balls bouncing showing off their different weights, building on our timing and spacing. To supplement what was taught in class I reread the Animator’s Survival Kit’s chapter: ‘Advancing Backwards to 1940’, covering spacing, timing, keys and workflow.
The first thing I did was to look up some bouncing balls online to base my animation on, since I didn’t have any around my house, I knew I wanted to have 3 very distinct weights so I looked for a ping pong ball (a very light weight, lots of bounce), a basket ball (a medium weight with rubber bounce) and a bowling ball (very heavy, no bounce).
I started my animation with the Bowling ball, I thought this was going to be the easiest one but I found trying to create that weight quite difficult. I’m really not happy with how this looked, almost as if there’s some underwater drag on the object, so I will have to take a look back at the timing and spacing with closer reference to the video. I found myself getting very frustrated with this so I moved onto my other balls before coming back to this one.
Then I moved onto my basket ball, I planned my contact points and just duplicated and moved my frames to keep a consistent volume. With this I noticed the bounces would half in height with each bounce, so I made sure this was translated into my animation. I overexaggerated the in-air drag to match up closely with the frames I counted in the reference video.
Finally I worked on my ping pong ball, I had to approach this one a couple of times to get something I was happy with, duplicating each frame similarly to my other animations to keep a control on my volumes. This ball had a lot less frames between each bounce and more contact frames, so I got this very jumpy ball that looks like the reference, I’m actually quite happy with this animation.
This was what all my balls bouncing ended up looking together, you can really see here that the timings between them don’t feel right with how weight would actually work, something to keep in mind for future when having objects interact within the same space.
I also wanted to go back and apply some squash and stretch to these. I think it works for the basketball, giving it some personality and giving more of the rubbery feel of the ball. However, I didn’t really like how it looked for my ping pong ball, I tried having some squash and stretch around the contact and then also having the contact follow this squash but since ping pong balls are made from plastic, for this particular movement it looked a bit strange to me. This could just be that I added too strong squashes, it’s definitely something I will have to investigate further.
Then I went back and had another go at my bowling balls weight. I think I got it a bit better this time but with some more practice I could definitely push this idea of weight further.
Using references to help animate isn’t something I had done before, it’s definitely something that I will need to practice with to create believability in my animations, and with more practice the better I will become at it.