Anticipation - bouncing balls

This week we were looking at anticipation within an animation and how important that can be for the viewers to recognise what the animators want them to prepare for in a scene. This exercise involved use animating two different balls that have some anticipation before they’re launched upwards. One ball has a short distance to jump to and so the squash and stretch isn’t that emphasised and the other one has a longer travel and so it has more squash and stretch included so that it seems believable for it to go that far. Since I’m quite used to animating bouncing balls in Maya, I completed this exercise more quickly than the others and I feel like I was able to capture the right look for the balls to have some anticipation before jumping up from the ground. Therefore, I used the graph editor quite effectively to get the result I wanted and I have understood the use of anticipation, which will be most useful when I animate characters in the future.

Ease in/out - Newton's Craddle animation

In this week’s exercise, we were tasked with replicating Newton’s cradle and to do this I had to research the motion of the balls at a slower pace so that I could get the right frames to key on my animation. As I followed the video, I tried to focus on each ball and to tweak any movements they make during the timeline of the animation and I made sure that the first and last key-frames were in the same position so that I could loop it. I think that my animation follows the right movements as Newton’s cradle does and it strongly replicates the motions of the balls in the video I used as a reference. But to improve, I could have animated the balls and string separately due to the strings vibrating on impact and the balls being swung by the string. Also, I could have even made three different cycles of the animated balls swinging so that the loop seems more realistic as they swing back and forth. Overall, I feel like this task helped me with using the graph editor to be able to use a slow ease in/out within an animation and I can use my self-reflected criticism to improve on this principle further.

Squash and Stretch - Bouncing ball and dinosaur

This week’s exercise involved us animating a ball, quite like the previous exercises, and dinosaur bouncing with the same timing. I first started with the ball, since I’ve done it before, which was quite hard to get the pause as it hits the bottom and this was required for me to add the exaggeration to it. So, I was able to get some help of how I could overcome this issue and then I found it easier to get the effect I wanted. I feel like after some tweaking of the key-frames within the graph editor, I was able to get a simple exaggerated bouncing ball that works well when looped and it is pretty accurate according to the video reference. After, I then worked on the dinosaur and this object was hard to animate due to there being separate components to animate from the dinosaur’s body. But, I changed different key-frames around and used the graph editor to make the motion of its more natural. I think that the poses and key-frames are correct, but there are some parts that don’t have enough ease for the movements to flow into each other and I could improve on this. For my first time animating a model with basic characteristics, I am happy with the result of my animation and this has taught me more about how to use key-frames and the graph editor to make a movement more realistic.

Bad timing example

The link to the video is here: Bad Timing.

Straight away from this animation you can see that the release of the ball is a bit too fast and the creator could have been slowed down a little bit to fit in with the slope it’s sliding down on. Then, the timing is wrong as the ball ‘bounces’ on the floor and is too linear/ similar as it gets lower to the ground. Also, the arc of the ball, supposedly bouncing, is in the wrong direction and so the result of this animation looks like the ball is bouncing in mid-air or has fallen into a tank of water. 

Exercise 2 - Demonstrating weight (heavy vs light)

After doing the first exercise, I started working on the other task that was there and it shows two balls (heavy and light ball) that are pushed off their platforms. I used the control curves within the scene to key-frame the different movements that I wanted for them and then I used the graph editor again to refine the ease in/out for the bounces. Since I used the graph editor before, I was able to complete this exercise much faster than the previous one and this helped me to familiarize myself with the tools that were needed for me to complete it. Looking back at the animation, I can spot only one thing that doesn’t seem to fit in with the timing and that is just before the ball on the left falls, it looks like to stops and then moves to fall off the edge. Other than that, the animation looks pretty accurate and therefore it shows my understanding of the use of graph editor.

Exercise 1 - Two dropping balls (physics vs cartoon)

For this task, we were required to use the graph editor to help aid in the animation of these two balls bouncing. Like the 2D flipbook version, I created an animation of two ball bouncing (realistic and cartoon-ish) and I was able to practise what I gained from the graph editor tutorial. The animation turned out very well, with some good use of timing with the two types of balls and the spacing between them that differentiate their types. I can’t help but feel like the realistic ball, on the left, lands a bit quick and is as if it’s being pulled down towards the end. Although this is a minor thing, I will certainly use what I’ve learnt in this exercise to aid me in future animation work and to improve a little on the timing. So, this task gave me the opportunity to develop the animation I made on the flipbook into a 3D animation in Maya and it allowed me the chance to learn how to use the graph editor to help with my animations.