WEEK 3: The Bouncing Ball

 In Week 3 we were asked to study the motion of a ball and consider the dynamics of movement.

At first I wanted to do a practice animation to warm up my hands and animation skills so I did a quick animation of a ball falling. This was a good warm up exercise for the task but also animation in general because this was the first animation of the course I completed due to late entrance (all previous weeks were back dated). 

The problem with this animation is the inaccurate increase in velocity of the ball whilst close to the ground, although it may be due to the fact there is no bounce up afterwards it does look unnatural and I smoothed the increase in later animations.

Frame breakdown with path of action.

The first full animation I did had a problem with the concept of squash and squeeze. So although the decent of the ball on the way up and down looks natural the way that the shape distorts when reaching point of contact is not natural. Though I would argue that it can still be used for accuracy with just a little less distortion. 

Frame breakdown

I then experimented with animating a heavier ball and tried to show this by showing its interaction with the environment. However I didn't feel happy with the way the level interacted with the weight of the ball due to it having no resistance before tipping over.

Frame Breakdown

What I then changed in this version of the animation was the interaction between the ball and the surface and the weight of the surface itself. Before when the ball had hit the surface it just spun and fell off whereas in this version I thought about how it balanced its weight on the axel and slowed down the turn and changed the direction of it falling. The changes in the movement of the ball were based around the impact with the surface; rather than tipping over straight away the ball slowed down whilst uncentering the surface and finally pulling it to the other side.

Frame Breakdown

In this ball animation I tried to implement all that I'd learnt previously and do some action that simulated real life and changed in dynamics. The movement here was trying to simulate the path of a ping pong ball being hit between two people, the changes in velocity reflecting on the strength at which they returned the serves. Unlike my first full bouncing ball animation I think I managed to realistically do squash and squeeze to an extent and also map the balls movement well.

In conclusion.

Although I had some knowledge of the arc of a bouncing ball and some of the principles of animation actually putting them into work was good practice. I could see myself get more comfortable with animating movement by the end of the exercises so I would take that as a success. In the future I would like to focus on altering the animation of an object to reflect the material it is made of because although you could say the animations I did could represent a certain object I didn't really take that into consideration before doing the drawings.