Stop Motion - Animate a heavy ball, a light ball and a splat.
...After the disastrous first 'bounce attempt' mid-lecture, it gave me a great opportunity to look at WHY it didn't work. When something is executed well, it's hard to tell why - it's good because 'it just is'. But when things fail, it's a lot easier to pick out what it was that didn't work.
'Bounce Attempt 1' didn't work for the following -
1) The ball moved from point A (release) to point B (contact) at a steady pace
Problem - The ball wasn't acting under any form of gravity, in real life it should have sped up between A and B due to the weight of the ball combining with gravity.
2) The ball left point B (contact) at the same speed as it connected with point B (contact)
Problem - Upon contact, movement energy would have been taken away by the 'floor' causing the second arc to have been lower/slower than the previous.
3) The ball stopped abruptly on the final point B (contact) of the last arc
Problem - The balls energy would have had to go somewhere. It should have had some form of motion to imply the dissipation of energy (i.e. rolling slightly, wobble etc)
For the task, I animated a light ball along a path and a heavy ball up and down. To try and improve the timing/spacing and to give the illusion of lightness, I animated the 'light ball' in large arcs, bouncing high off the ground and with larger gaps between frames. It seemed to work better than the original attempt, however it felt off slightly in the second arc and having onion-skinning that showed more prior frames than just the previous 1 would have helped.
The heavy ball was animated up and down. From release to contact, the speed increased considerably to imply the action of gravity over a large weight. The movement from contact into the second bounce was considerably lower and slower - this was done as a lot of speed should be lost due to the amount of energy needed to spring a large weight back off the ground. Again, a wider frame-spanning onion-skinner would have been useful, and I was unsure how to end this test - in the end, I opted for a slight roll but something better could have been done.
To do the splat, it started of as what was going to be an up/down bounce - it was as it started 'squashing' in an attempt at 'squash and stretch' that it turned into the splat. The ball was squished down in increments until it was almost flat. Out of the three tasks, this felt the least successful - a real splat would have been less uniform. This ended up being squished out in all directions evenly whereas really it should have had trails 'run' in several random directions at different lengths of 'run'.
CG - Animate a bouncing ball along a path of travel. Implement squash, stretch and rotation.
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