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: