Finished animations

After the research that i did in my group and externally through youtube i went onto maya and created the ball bounce animations.



This was as interesting experience for me as i have attempted to animate human rigs before and yet although they weren't brilliant, i found the ball animations harder in a sense of timing and trying to make the balls bouncing motion look fluid and natural. This appeared to be quite difficult even once applying the 'curve' function in the animation graph editor, and performing various tweaks during the animations.


Below are my finished animation AVI's.


Bouncy Ball animation

Tennis Ball animation

External research

Before going into the animation stage i decided to do a bit of research on youtube to look at various ball animation tests to see how they compare to the ones that we recorded ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoR2k3B0ifk - As covered in the introduction to animation module, i looked up the importance and steps involved in the ball animation test. Its importance in animation in known to be quite significance in simplifying and understanding the aspects of animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6I3JI4vJv0 - This is another example of a reference shot for a ball animation, this time using a ping pong ball. Notice the difference between their reference video and the ones that we shot. the surface that the ball is being bounced off of and the material and air capacity of the ball.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcbXBdIvefc&feature=fvwp&NR=1 - I thought i would also include this video link in my blog as this features the disney character 'wall-e' interacting with a lot of bouncy balls for a promo for the movie before its release. i thought this was interesting to add as its relevance to what we are doing and also to see animated balls being done proffesionaly and on such a big scale.

Research for bouncing balls animation - Recorded footage of the results

Below is the recorded results for both animation tests, starting with the tennis ball.

This is the video test for the tennis ball animation, as stated in the previous post the time taken to stop and amount of bounces was recorded.

This is the video test for the bouncy ball animation. Again the same factors was recorded.

There are several obvious differences between the two animation tests because of the differences in terms of each balls attributes.

The next step is now to take these results and transform them into an animation playable in maya. 

Research for bouncing balls animation

For the first part of the module we have been asked to create two short animations of two seperate balls bouncing on a surface. Both of these balls must have seperate qualities that define their parameters whilst being animated. For example the amount of air each ball has within it to determine the amount of bounce, the material that its made of ect. As well as this external factors are to be taken into account such as the surface its being bounced off, objects that it comes into contact with during the excercise and so on.

To research and find out the estimated length of the animation and the amount of times the balls bounced, we were given instructions to carry out as well as improvising methods of our own. We counted the amount of bounces and time taken for the balls to come to a stop.

These parameters were recorded at different height intervals to add variety to the research of which one recorded test would be used for each of the two balls to create each maya animation.

Today in introduction also taught me the main principles of animation, these are the key components to creating smooth and realistic movement in animation and the following ones can be used in the given module excercise:

- Squash and stretch (can be used subsequently in the 'ball' animations)
- Timing (to make the bouncing of the balls look right)

An example of a ball with squash and stretch applied.