Here's my first one

Tenez,
Glad to see you are wasting no time moving on to the Bootcamps.
I admire your tenacity!

I haven't even done the Bootcamps myself so I hesitate to comment.
If I may critique a little though...

The big ball is BOOM rock solid and animated well.
There is something that seems off with the little guy though.

My eye says it's at about the point in the captured image I've attached.
The little ball expands at the top where I think it should be returning to its original shape.

I may not have a clue here but thought I'd wish you the best and offer that.
Keep on animating!

hey thanks . i'll have to fix that.

Rodney is correct. Think of squash and stretch for the ball as if it were made of really springy rubber.

It will only squash flat when it's hit something fast(like the ground) and then it will try to round itself out again ( like when it's flying thru the air).

There's more to S&S but that's a start.

But very good to see another person take the animation plunge!

Heres' my tweaked excercise. what do u think?

Much better

It is better, but... the ball is still squashing before it hits the ground. Not in this universe. Remember the squash happens because the ball has hit the ground, not because it's about to hit the ground. Even if it were a "character" ball it would stretch, not squash, right before impact to "absorb" the shock. A pre-squashed ball has nowhere to go when it finally does hit.

The other thing is the timing of the whole up & down motion. Gravity means the ball will always be going faster and faster and faster as it goes down, or slower and slower and slower as it goes up (until it starts going back down again). So a bouncing object can never move at an even pace either up or down.

The curve editor is your best place to tweak the motion of the ball without having to make a lot of key frames.

I think I got the squashing fixed. I'm sure how to fix the timing though.

Heres excercise B

Still need to work on the impact causing squash. The best way to solve it is to make sure you have a key frame that shows the ball touching the ground and still retaining its shape. The next frame or two frames later, have it squashed. If you look at yours frame by frame, you'll notice that the squash has begun before it touches the ground.

To fix the timing, open up your time line and click on the little button at the bottom of the timeline that looks like jaggy lines and it should show you the curves. Click on the ball model and look at the Y translation curve. It should look like a series of humps. On those curves should be a series of little red squares, those are your key frames. Click on the bias handle button at the top of the screen to show bias handles and then click on one of the red squares at the top of the humps. Spread out the bias handle at the top of the curve. This will cause the ball to slow down at the top of the bounce, giving as more realistic motion.

I'll try to post a picture late today to show you what I mean better.

Scott

I promised you a picture. Hopefully this will be worth a thousand words.

The picture is of the timeline of the Y (up/down) position of the ball. You can view the time line by clicking on View->Timeline.

Things to note:

1) I have circled the bias handle for the key frame at the top of a bounce. Make this nice and wide by tugging on the end of the bias handle.
2) Notice the two key frames at the bottom of each bounce. This is when the ball makes contact and squashes.
3) Notice how each bounce gets progressively smaller.
4) Notice how few keyframes it takes to make a ball bounce (at lest for the up and down part)

The timeline is very handy when you're trying to smooth up an animation!

Good luck!

Scott

Hey, I'm not sure if the intent is that these are normal solid objects or if they are objects with personality. The heavy ball actually speeds up as it leaves screen right. This makes it appear alive. If you want it to look realistic, you should make sure that the heavy ball's motion is either constant across the entire shot or steadily slowing down over the entire shot.

Your motion overall appears a little inconsistent. I think you might have some extra keyframes cluttering up the graph editor. Make sure you only have the keyframes you need. For instance, if a ball is moving along the blue z axis across the screen, from one position to another, and you want that motion to be smooth and constant, you should only have 2 keyframes on the z channel. The first pose, and the last pose. Go through the graph editor and look for unneccesary keyframes that might be messing with your timing.

Nice start.

I never did thank everybody for all the advice. And sadly this excercise that I was working on is gone. I haven't been animating for a few months now. So what little I knew is gone. I recently purchased Cristins Animate CD vol 1. (Actually I got it for christmas) and I think this is a nice place to start to get back to the basics. (Although I don't think I ever got past the basics, so never mind.) I'll be using this thread to post my progress as I go through Cristins Animate CDs.

Heres the first. The bouncing ball.

Welcome back to animation!

We can make this bounce better. I've marked up a copy for you to frame through...

-the white dots track the path of the ball.

- the orange lines mark parts where the ball is traveling at a steady speed in a nearly straight line. That's very unbounce-like. bouncing objects never travel in straight lines (unless they are bouncing in one spot),. Arcs, arcs, arcs.

Also , falling objects are always accellerating, and after the bounce they are decellerating on the way up (until they start to fall again). They will never move the same distance vertically from one frame to another. (the horizontal distance will stay pretty much the same, however)

-Note also that the first complete bounce and the second both take 12 frames. Not possible. the second one doesn't rise nearly as high as the first so it will spend fewer frames going up and down.

-the green frames show spots where the last stretch frame before the contact should actually be touching the ground. It helps to make the squash less poppy.

A good start! These are easy fixes.

Here's a bowling ball. All though you'll probably find a million things that I didn't catch, I have to say i'm pretty damn proud of this one. It's amazing how much rotation really adds to it. Now to fix my bouncing ball.

Robcat thanks for the excellent break down. I tried to address all the things you mentioned. And here's the revis.

Bowling ball:

I like the overall timing and the way the bounces decay. THat is working well.

But there are two significant omissions.

I bet once you look at this path you can tell me what they are:

I see it's dropping at a diagonal angle. So I would need to add some arc to that. I was thinking it doesn't bounce high enough, but bowling balls don't really bounce all that much do they? I'm way off aren't I?

Bounce 2:

This does look better.

- I still think the arcs are a bit flattish on the sides.

- I think the ball is staying stretched too long befors and after each bounce. Try just using stretch for 2 frames before and after the squash

-another detail i see now is that the ball is traveling a bit during the contact. That's giving it an odd swooping look at the bounces. Set it so the center of the ball during the squash is very, very close to where the ball first contacted. and make the departing stretch look like it came from that same spot. The first bounce is pretty close, but the second one is quite swoopy.

Ater the second bounce, the ball actually stretches more on the second frame after the bounce than it did on the first. Don't let that happen.

Every time I try and shift the position of the squashed ball it affects the position of everything else. How do I change the postion of one frame without affecting the rest of the frames.

This is a slight revision

The fact that they (the ones who rigged the exercise ball) put the bone at one edge of the ball instead of the middle, makes it challenging to tilt the ball while keeping it centered.

Bowling Ball:
Correct. Also see that it is not accelerating on the way down. The dots are almost exactly the same distance apart.
The bounce heights are great. But like in the first fall, the ball is ascending and falling at fairly steady rates. It's almost like it's flying rather than bouncing.





Of course you know that you can keyframe that ball at any position on any frame. Place it, key it.

But you'll need to consider the ball as a whole object rather than just animating the motion of a bone.

Keyframe the ball on the frame before the squash. Then anything you do after that can't touch it. Keyframes are free. Use them anytime you want the ball to be in a certain place at a certain time.

You may need three keyframes in a row to get the stretch, squash and next stretch in the right place.

Bounce3:

the spacing on the first fall is WAY better. Now get the other arcs as well spaced as that.

But notice it falls in 5 frames on the first drop, but takes 6 frames onthe second, even though it's falling from a lower height.

The first full arc is still flattish on the sides, second one is better.

Hi forevernameless!
Your drop is looking great! The arcs are nice and smooth, and the spacing is very good also. The only peeve I have is that the ball stops very suddenly, maybe add some more squash & stretch so it doesn't look like it just 'sticks' the landing? Nice work!

Well I didn't want to linger too long in the same place. So while I did tweak my bouncing ball excercises I had to work on something else. Heres a ball with a tail from Boot Camp 2. What do you think?

Hey, looking good!

looped it for ya

[attachmentid=12843]

Hey Thanks. How do you loop it by the way?

NP
you have to buy QT pro. Its nice though you can play movies at full screen too.

Well I must be getting better. Nobody has any criticisms. Heres my next one

The looping tail ball looked great.



On the most recent clip, the tail seems to drag behind the same amount no matter how fast or slow the head moves.

On the first move to the right the tail is lingering behind way too much. Gravity is always trying to pull that tail down and at slow speeds gravity will begin to dominate over the samll amount of intertia the tail has that was holding it back.

The other item that strikes me immediately is at around 0:01:24-0:02:00.

Follow the last tail segment. it actually slows to a stop, the reverses, the reverses again, then accelerates up into the air. Drag can not account for that motion and that is why that part looks "off".

Other parts look good. You could probably loosen up the landing clatter of the tail segments even more for better effect.

I tweaked my falling tail ball excercise, but I don't think it was that significant of a change. So I'm gonna post a new excercise. A lamp hop.

Nice lamp hop, nameless. Not too fond of the blue light, but that's just me. Good follow-thru. You gave him an appropriate sense of weight, for a lamp.

Thanks for looking arkaos. The light was just something i was playing around with.

Hey that's a fine hop with fine timing! Good overlap too.

We can make those arcs much better... I've marked it up. the green line shows a rough approximation of what you might want to do in a hop like this.

Onthe second play there are some pose issues noted. try to get full extension onthe legs and drag that foot more.

Good work!