For our homework in Sarah’s module we animated balls of different sizes and weights in Krita. I found Krita rather easy to use, owing it to my prior knowledge in Adobe Animate. Learning about timing and spacing our key frames, I learned that spacing out the keyframes can make an animation go slower, and keeping them close together can make it go by faster. This is dependent on whenever or not we animate on 1s, which is a unique drawing per frame, or 2s, which is a unique drawing for every 2 frames.

I animated a tennis ball, a golf ball, a bowling ball and a ping pong ball. The videos are below.

Mostly I simply judged and pictured how heavy each ball was and put them down as I went along, though ball bouncing animations are quite common on Youtube. So I looked a couple of ball animations from other animators for comparison.

Bouncing ball – How to make an animation – YouTube

Both my animations and theirs use squash and stretch in their process.

Squash and stretch is one of the 12 principles of animation that states that animated objects will get longer or flatter to emphasise their speed, momentum weight and mass.

In the case of a tennis ball or a rubber ball, it squashes whn it hits the ground and then returns to its original shape as it returns to the air, implying a hallow or soft ball that responds easily to inertia.

Most of my choices for balls are much more stiff, inert balls, such as ping pong balls, bowling balls and golf balls, all of which do not squash when they hit the ground. They also have different weights to them, the bowling ball hardly bounces at all, while the ping pong ball bounces quite easily in spite of being stiff because it is so light.

1. Squash & Stretch – 12 Principles of Animation – YouTube

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