I'm aware that the title is long-winded, but it is the truth.
Our latest project in Maya was to animate three balls, each with varying levels of bounce -- these balls being a golf ball, tennis ball, and bowling ball, respectively.
Before we could start animating, we had to find a way to get specific measurements for each bounce. So we took a field trip down to some off the trail area in the school where we could drop balls of varying weights without causing major damage to significant areas of the school. Each drop and bounce was filmed, then brought into Photoshop, where we marked the highest and lowest points of each bounce alongside the frame number. We then put our results into a Google Sheets to keep everything organized.
I managed to start modeling the balls and plane a while before the bounce calculations; it mainly boiled down to making spheres of differing sizes with respective colors and bump maps that I pulled off the internet for each. Lighting was the same as usual -- so there's nothing new or interesting that happened during modeling.
The first few bounce keyframes were made with the timeline -- but after a while, we were taught how to use the graph editor to make our lives ten times easier! The graph editor is used to make frames, and appears like a line graph that dips up, down, and all around. Making keyframes on the graph editor and punching in each respective coordinate from the Google Sheet made animating ten times easier. Other things to note were making the movements linear (so the bounce looked more organic), and pushing a couple keyframes around to make sure everything looked good, which meant that some measurements (specifically the inaccurate ones) went unused.
Then came the crazy part -- picking an image to use as a background for the animation, so that it wasn't a plane with a black sky! I ended up picking a tennis court, and shifted camera angles and lights around to make everything look good and natural.
I'm quite proud with the final result, but the bounces still retain an artificial feel. While it may be outside my skill level, making the balls stray into different directions would improve the overall quality. But all in all, I'm proud with the finished animation! You can watch it below...
(I'm fully aware that it's a little dark. Maya lighting is wonky and doesn't like to cooperate with me.)
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all in the next post!
-Tate
