Bouncing Ball Animation

Today I created the bouncing ball animation using the guide from the "Introducing Autodesk Maya 2015" book. I found that this guide was useful and taught me many new techniques for creating animations in Maya.

The Hierarchy

The guide advised that it is a good idea for each the ball object to create three layers named "translate", "scale" and "rotate." I found this to be useful for changing each value in the X, Y and Z axis for each attribute as it kept the attributes organised into individual layers.

Using the shortcuts Shift + W, Shift + E and Shift + R allowed me to also create new frames specifically for a certain attribute.

Graph Editor

Whilst following the guide, I was introduced into using the graph editor. I found the graph editor to be useful as it showed the timing and movements between each frame demonstrating it via curves. This allowed me to get my bouncing ball animation to be as smooth as possible.

A couple of tools I used in the graph editor is the "Linear Tangents" button and the "Flat Tangents" button. By using both these tools on the ball bouncing frames and ball landing frames, I was able to get a smoother look to the ball bouncing.

Squash and Stretch Technique

The guide also taught me about the squash and stretch technique which is also used by Pixar's introduction mentioned in an earlier blog post. This allowed to make my ball bouncing animation seem more "cartoony" and satisfying. It involved modifying the scale of the ball in the Y axis so that the scale reduced two frames after hitting the ground and then increasing the scale three frames after and then reducing it back to its original scale value. 


The Animation

(Although the animation is set to 30fps, the .GIF modified the frame rate and therefore it looks slightly different to when viewed in Maya.)