Maya: Bouncing Ball

In Maya, we are creating an animation of a bouncing ball. Here are some references to help consolidate our understanding on how balls may bounce depending on mass, material, volume etc.

 

 

Here is a preview of my animation:

[sketch]

To make this, we were first provided with the scene containing the environment and the ball. Then, after doing a rough sketch of the key poses that the ball would be using, I prepared the scene by changing the workspace mode to animation in the drop down.

First, you set the position of the ball before adding in a key frame in the timeline with the shortcut ‘S’. Keyframes appear on the timeline at the bottom of the page as a red line. The shortcut ‘S’ creates a key frame in which translation, scale and rotation can be edited.

If you wanted to create a key frame where only one of those transformations could be changed, you would use the shortcut ‘shift + the shortcut key for the tool within the Maya software’. For instance, the shortcut for scale is ‘R’ and so, to create a scale specific key frame, the shortcut would be ‘shift + R’. This is helpful for when you want to organise exactly what you are animating about the polygon as you go along.

[main poses]

I used 3 main key frames, each 10 frames apart, to complete one bounce : contact – highest point – contact, following the general idea of height decrease that I drew in my plan. I only needed 3 main poses because Maya used interpolation to fill in the movement between key frames.

After completing the basic bounce, I added squash and stretch to make it more realistic and give the ball some character.

My graph

Linear Graph

Using the graph editor, found in Windows > Graph Editor, I changed the speed of the ball so that it would be fastest when falling into contact before bouncing back up quickly initially.