Introduction to 3D Animation

This week we started our group narrative work and were given a homework to animate a cube sliding across the screen at different speeds, and balls bouncing. In a similar way to our assignment from last semester this is meant to help us animate and portray weight in an object as well as showing us how interpolation would work in Blender. Unlike with the assignment’s we did last week, Blender will auto-tween the keyframes which saves a lot of time.

Th first task with the cube was pretty straightforward. It was very similar to las semesters work but instead we used the default cube instead of our own shape. It was rather simple, we just added three keyframes an reduced the length of the animation so it would loop correctly. Following the video next I need to change the interpolation type so that it wouldn’t slow down, making a smoother and more consistent movement. After that I duplicated the cube and wanted to make the movement seem quicker. I switched the graph from Linear to Bezier, then adjusted the top to make the initial movement a lot more snappy. Finally to make the box squash and expand I copied the last box and started to add scale keyframes. I just need to add points where it became smaller then add bits where it returned to normal.

The for the ball homework I started by looking at the example videos that were put on Blackboard. The goal was to make three bouncing balls showing off differing weights. A normal weight like a tennis ball, a more springy ball like a ping-pong ball, and a very heavy ball like a bowling ball.

I set up the scene so that each ball started in the same place and fell onto the same ground, as a way to help reference each drop.
The first ball bounces a bit before coming to a stop, I had it roughly half the amount it went up on each bounce. For the bouncy ball I reduced the number of bounces and held it in the air longer, I also increased how much it bounced back. For the final ball I wanted to have a bit of fun so I cut the ground in half using the knife tool, then keyframed their rotations and positions to make them fall apart after the ball fell. after animating the height and falling frames I followed the video and began to keyframe the movements to make the bounce forwards.

I’m pretty happy with how these turned out.