Project 3

Bouncing Ball Animation | February 28, 2019

Bouncing Ball Animation

I chose to do the alternate tutorial assignment for Project 3, and completed the bouncing ball tutorial in Introducing Autodesk Maya 2016, with three customized features.

Storyboards

Final Animation

Three Principles of Animation

Squash and Stretch

The ball stretches while falling and squashes on impact

Anticipation

The ball pauses in the air for a moment after the keyboard tilts before it begins falling. This is much like when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and is able to look down to their demise before they plummet

Arc

While the ball bounces across the keyboard (and the letters later in the animation), it follows an arc, as seen in the photo above, which shows successive frames layered over one another

Three Customized Features (and then some)

As clearly seen above, I customized the bouncing ball animation by:

adding Dr. Davis's face to the ball using a blinn texture
making the ball bounce across a keyboard
making the keyboard tilt so the ball rolls off
adding a black hole (or the void that is Dr. Davis's spam email folder, where students' frantic emails go to die)
adding an additional sequence of the ball bouncing off of the letters above the void

But where can you get the amazing photo I used for my sphere texture and that stunning keyboard?

Right here: http://www.cs.wm.edu/~tadavis/

and here: http://www.man-machine.com/product/really-cool-keyboard/

Final note: I uploaded my animation in 60fps, so you can watch it at half speed to see the slight squash and stretch as the ball bounces across the letters

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