Using Adobe Animate, we are learning to animate a bouncing ball.
First, open Adobe Animate and make a new ActionScript 3.0 file with a width of 1920px and height 1080px.
It will then create your stage.
After this, select the oval tool (shortcut O) from the toolbar and draw a circle with a fill but no stroke.
You can decorate the ball with a highlight if you would like – this is my design.
Once your ball is done, use the basic selection tool (shortcut V) to select the ball before going to Modify > Convert to Symbol. Name it appropriately and ensure that the type is set to graphic. After this, make another symbol using the ball that you just made into a symbol and name it ‘animated ball’. Double click it to go into working on the symbol.
Go to the timeline at frame 5, right-click and select insert frame before inserting a keyframe on the 5th frame. Then, on frame 5, go to Modify > Transform > Rotate 90° CW. Repeat this process every 5 frames until frame 20.
Now, starting on the first frame, right-click and select Create Classic Tween. Repeat this for frames 5, 10 and 15. Create a keyframe on frame 19 and delete frame 20 so that you don’t end up with a duplicate of the first frame – this is due to the fact that the ball is being rotated exactly 90° each time and so it will end up exactly in the same place.
Now go back to Scene 1 in the crumb trail and create frames up to frame 38 so that you have 2 full rotations of the ball.
To animate the ball, right-click the first frame and select Create Motion Tween. You will then need to drag the playhead to where you want the animation to end – in this case, it is the last frame. After this, you drag the ball across the stage to where you want it to end up at the end of the animation. The light blue line indicates the path of the ball that you can manipulate.
To manipulate the path, move the playhead along 5 frames and change the position of the ball each time. For instance, my ball starts in the air so I would have my ball on the ground at frame 5 but up in the air at frame 10 before going back down again to create the bouncing path.
Using the Convert Anchor Point tool (shortcut shift + C) in the Pen dropdown, you can curve the straight lines of the path using the bezier handles so that the movement of the ball looks more realistic.
To squash the ball, go to the frame on the timeline where the ball hits the ground. Select the ball and go into properties before changing the height to half of what the original value was. A frame before this, ensure that you change the height value to the original so that the ball doesn’t begin squashing from when it starts falling. You can repeat this process with a varying decrease in height depending on how much speed the ball has with each of the bounces.
I decided to export my animation as a GIF so that it loops continuously:
For me, the most difficult part was adding squash as, when changing the height of the ball, the path it was following altered as well and you had to fix it afterwards. To help me, I could’ve used a guide to indicate the platform that the ball was landing on so that I didn’t have to worry about moving the ball back to the same landing point each time for every bounce. I do feel, however, that I was able to achieve creating a decent animation as it flows smoothly and does look how it is intended to.
Jasmine Cooper 