Bouncing ball animation practice

 Animation Techniques

In this project I am going to learn the fundementals of animation. 

First I am going to research and practice the software and learn the basics of animation for example timing and spacing.

For this initial animation I am just using a ball, I will develop this more later with the ball and tail. This will be more fun as I will be able to give it character, emotion and even a short story.

After this we are going to repeat these exercises in Maya.

I have looked at the 12 principles of animation.

Squash and stretch

Anticipation

Staging

Straight ahead action and pose to pose

Follow through and overlapping action

Slow in and slow out

Arcs

Secondary action

Timing

Exaggeration

Solid drawing

Appeal

Because my project only involves bouncing a ball the most important principles will be squash and stretch, timing, ease in and ease out and arcs.

Here is a picture I found that shows squash and stretch.

I have done some tests and practice of using the software in Toon Boom.

 

Now I have done some research into ball bouncing I selected two different balls one quiet a bouncy rubber  ball and one hard wooden ball to bounce on a hard tiles surface. I decided to use a hard surface to get maximum bounce.

I filmed this many times and took the best two of each videos of each type of ball and  put them into two separate video clips.  

I timed how long each bounce was and measured the heights the ball bounced to. I did this several times to work out an average. By doing this I could work out how many frames there should be in each arc of the ball bouncing.

This is a rough working of the timing and spacing, but from my research I have worked out that I will need to put a few more frames in.