Feeling weight: Beach ball vs. Bowling Ball!

Another week in Animation Mentor down -- man it is going by so fast!! This week we were assigned two bouncing balls of different weights and you had to animate them appropriately. This assignment really focusing on timing and spacing and shows what each principle can really change in a ball. Below is my sketch I drew for my planning stage of my assignment:

My biggest focus this week was to ensure that both balls were in the scene and you could easily tell the difference between what kind of balls they were regardless of their texture.

Here was my first pass at my beach ball and bowling ball:

So overall there is definitely a good feeling of different weights between the balls but the timing is definitely off on both. The bowling ball is speeding in a bit too fast and slow down too fast for how quickly it enters and the beach ball is feeling a little too floaty and definitely bouncing a bit too high. As I tweak these you will see my progression below:

I got some feedback regarding my bowling ball color and speed, so I changed those up big time:

As you can probably see by each video they look very close in similarity. My overall changes were very slight. My final assignment I turned in is below:

I leave you with a question to see what you may have learned so far: What two principles allow animation to "feel weight"?

Ball Bounce - Final Revision

After turning in my last assignment I went back and revised my bouncing ball with some very very very small changes.


Here is my revision I will be submitting:





Do you see a difference?
Here is my ball bounce I turned in again:

Ball Bounce - Welcome to Timing and Spacing!

This week in Animation Mentor we were assigned to do a basic ball bounce that is comparable to a basketball or soccer ball -- Simple enough right? Right. So you think it is? Chances are if you attempt to do a ball bounce your first time without knowing much about animation you'd probably end up with something like this:




Obviously there are multiple things wrong with this ball bounce. Do you know what they are? I'll explain:

• Gravity: The ball is moving without any physical force actually 'pulling' it down and thus it feels very floaty and almost as if you were on the moon essentially. I'll explain how this is simulated further down.
• Weight: Right now the ball doesn't really feel like anything we've ever seen with a soccer ball or basketball. We really need to show how much it weighs and we do this within the graph editor in Maya.
• Timing: The amount of time the ball takes to get from the top of a bounce to the bottom of the bounce becomes less as it accelerates from gravity. Right now the timing is all the same and this is one of the 12 principles of animation that are so very important! Timing timing timing!
• Spacing: Spacing is another principle of animation and it essentially means the amount of space (or frames) between one key pose to the next key pose. Think of it as how many frames does it take for the ball to get from the top to the bottom and how to we spread those out to make it feel right.

So take a look at my sketch drawing to plan out my bouncing ball below:

The first thing you will notice is at the bottom of my page I am marking the frames at which certain points in the bounce occur -- this is a way of timing your animation! Planning is key to having a strong start in your animation so even this rough sketch is a great way for me to visualize how my ball is going to look when I start animating it in Maya. You can also see my spacing with the amount of balls drawn out in my sketch. This is easier seen with an actual movie but you can get the idea from the sketch.
Now that I've done my planning... let's dive into Maya!
My first step in Maya is to block out my animation. This is essentially a very rough setup where you can see where all the key frames land in your animation and mine looked like this:

From this you can see the general idea of how the ball with bounce just by visually filling in the in-betweens in your mind. Now I then go into Maya and add some basic timing and spacing that allows for the in-betweens to start forming and I came up with this:

So now one thing you probably are noticing is a floaty feeling to the ball... easy fix right? Lets add a little gravity, some rotation, and overall weight to the bouncing ball:

Now we are looking good!! From here on out I start tweaking with timing and spacing until I feel it is right. The biggest challenge I faced was the very end of the ball when it settles. I did three more iterations as you can see below:

Then I just had some final tweaking and alas I turned in the following bouncing ball:

Posing, posing, and yes, more posing!

My first official assignment for Animation Mentor is complete and below is the journey I took on a simple pose I found from observing people in a public space. Below are my sketches (No I am not Michelangelo, but the idea is to feel the pose) I drew for the assignment:

From the above sketches I circled the one I wanted to use originally and started to pose, Stu, the Animation Mentor rig we're provided. It took me about 45 minutes to get the my first iteration:

I was reasonably happy but overall feedback was that the pose was hard to tell what was going on and I have a really nasty tangent on the right elbow. (A tangent is when you basically have an edge of a part of the body or object lined up with another edge and it removes depth and can add confusion to viewers). I decided to take my original pose and twist it up a bit so that Stu was more visible to viewers and I came up with the following:

Now you can see Stu in his entirety but there is still something that is bothering me with him... his balance! The overall balance of the pose feels completely wrong and is actually ends up being my biggest struggle with the pose. I tweaked this pose not once, not twice, not three times... but TEN more times before I came up with what I turned in. Below you can see the order of my pose from version three to version twelve:

At this point I'm feeling pretty good about Stu. The balance feels better and his weight is definitely place a bit better, but I just do some more small tweaking and get the final pose in order with the last four revisions:

AHHH!!!!! What the heck am I doing!? Now I am going the opposite direction. I don't like the silhouette the left arm is forming and somehow Stu's head is ginormous compared to his body... ah ha!... rendering focal lens... lets adjust that to 50 and see what happens....

Yes! I am happy with this result and this is what I ended up turning in. I completely spaced about his left arm and didn't adjust it. After getting my e-critique from my mentor I decided to clean up Stu just a bit more and my final pose for Stu is:

Can you guess what my mentor had me change? Let me know!