Animation basics, expect lots of balls
admin
Not those kinda balls.
So I'm learning animation. I was due to begin Animation Mentor back in June, had to pull out due to a $2000 shortfall. Saved the money up, reapplied... beginning in Jan 2012... beyond excited.
Anyway, in the meantime I'm trying to familiarise myself with some basics, bouncing balls, until I get a handle on timing and spacing and all the other wonderful principles.
I know there aren't a lot of you animators out there but I also know there's some great ones, feel free to comment on what looks good, bad, glaringly awful!
Thanks!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33057988/Animation/Two%20Balls%201.mov
So I'm learning animation. I was due to begin Animation Mentor back in June, had to pull out due to a $2000 shortfall. Saved the money up, reapplied... beginning in Jan 2012... beyond excited.
Anyway, in the meantime I'm trying to familiarise myself with some basics, bouncing balls, until I get a handle on timing and spacing and all the other wonderful principles.
I know there aren't a lot of you animators out there but I also know there's some great ones, feel free to comment on what looks good, bad, glaringly awful!
Thanks!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33057988/Animation/Two%20Balls%201.mov
Replies
nopunintended
Following a little bit of critique, here's the polished update.
http://vimeo.com/27862412
*Sigh* Nevermind then :P
Seriously though looks cool man, they look quite lifelike!
Crits:
- As it hops it doesn't seem to rotate, even tho it is making half a rotation as it travels. You might need more hang time at the top of the arch to help sell the rotation. You also need to the hang to explain the transition in energy as from launch momentum to gravity. There is a point where the launch momentum and gravity cancels each other out and the object is weightless, forever how many fractions of a frame that is, its still there. An object bouncing is never as fast moving through the top of the arch as it is moving through the bottoms.
- You account for the up and down energy nicely with squash and stretch but not the forward (left to right) momentum. It hops and it sticks with no overshoot or recoil, the anticipation is there but barely noticeable. You want it to land and go a little past the pose and then come back to it.
- After the little ball pesters the big ball, it rolls back to its mark and sticks (needs more overshoot). It also is deflated a bit, then inflates a bit as the other one does, in general things don't fire on the same keys,(its why mo-cap is generally a forest of keys). This is typically called overlap, where keys in the lower hierarchy aren't hitting at the same time.
Think of a whip, as you start to move the handle, that motion travels down the whip. If there where joints in the whip they wouldn't all rotate at the same time, it would have a wave effect. That motion would overlap as it travels through the joints.
This theory of overlap translates between objects also so the smaller ball and bigger ball shouldn't inflate at the same time. If the little ball inflating is meant to be the little ball watching the bigger grow, it should roll back a bit as if looking up instead of inflate.
Cool stuff, I liked the ending, I smiled and it was a bit unexpected which is what you always want to work in when you can, so that was great.
I completely forgot about including some horizontal forces on the squash/stretch, I'm not sure why but you're right, when it's missing it is noticeable.
I've made a few changes as per your suggestions.
Arcs were indeed pretty linear on the little ball bounces, I've flattened them out on the apex a bit so it gets a bit more hangtime.
Added a touch of follow through on the bounces and a tiny tiny bit on the rolls near the end. I've also moved the timing of the little ball inflating next to the big one, although it may need pushing a little further maybe.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33057988/Animation/Two%20Balls%20Polished%202.m4v
Edit: I'll try to give a crit here, but just a disclaimer, I'm not that familiar with animation, so i guess take this accordingly, lol. But like Mark said before, I think the anticipation of the ball hitting the ground is still not reading as well as it could. With the ball having sentience like it does, I think that it reach out, if you will, to the ground as it lands. Looking good tho. Some nice character poking through
Yeah I agree, I could polish it a little more I think. If I had the patience I'd adjust all of the timing. I set myself up for a struggle because it's all a little fast which leaves me very little time to add adequate in betweens. Then I rocketed ahead too far to a point where it would be a pain to adjust all the timing.
Some of the subtleties in the bounces are done frame by frame. I think I can add in-betweens between frames in Maya but that's not something I've ever tried to do.
Nice to see another user on PC trying out animation! god knows we see enough T-poses up in this bish..:poly127:
I have not read through Vig's reply yet, but I'm sure its awesome and I'll give it a read tomorrow, so he might have said what I am about to say (how little it very well may be..).
I'm not going to read into this all too much as I can't really say that I've ever really sat down and tried to nail any basic principle animations such as balls or flour sacks and as such don't really consider myself an expert or that I have anything to add to animations like that
However (there's always a however!:poly136:),
the major things I react to with your go at polished balls:poly122: is the timing of the movements, and the spacing of the keys, mainly while the ball is in the air.
I'm focusing on the animation up until the small ball meets the big ball.
I don't care too much about their interaction and am not going to give any feedback regarding animation over there, sorry
I'd like to see you add a couple of frames where the ball stays in the air, and not being sucked down by gravity as soon as it is about to get some hang time. (mmm, sucking hanging balls:poly129:)
I did a very, very, crude example of what I mean. Not trying to defend this piece too much, but it was done in about 5 minutes and just to illustrate my point!
It is in no way a good ball nor should you copy paste this if you want you balls to be extra polished!
[ame]
Basically, let it float a bit in mid air
You also have a stop in between every jump. Why? Is the ball thinking if it should continue jumping? or are you trying to give it a wobbly jelly kinda feel?
Anyways, I'd like to see it not stop between the jumps, but rather just move on to its next jump (as in my epic ball video up top, bow down to it!:poly136:)
This may be a kind of forced feedback, and may not really be of any use to you..
If we look at the top of the ball (what?:poly142:), its moving back and forth between the jumps. This is what got me thinking that you might want it to look like jelly?
Anyways, it looks kind of broken to me, it rotating back and forth one key at a time.
Meh, I dunno..
Gonna hit the sack (....:poly141:), got that Stockholm PC meet-up tomorrow! got to have a fresh mind!
gg!
I think the main problem is, a mans balls are a very personal thing, they each have their own personality
Seriously though, I totally see what you're saying. The problem I'm seeing is that it's so unclear how a generic ball 'should' behave. I guess my eyes see a ball so I'm thinking it should bounce along as one would expect a ball to bounce, but then I tried to give it some character and make it move more like it had a leg or something, which it clearly doesn't.
The 'rocking' on each landing was me attempting to implement Vig's suggestion of inertial horizontal movement, but I was using a pretty awful ball setup which didn't allow me any proper rigged squashing/stretching. I'm not fantastic with the technicalities of rigging so my ball was basically a double grouped sphere with translate on the top node, scale on the second and rotation on the child. This meant to get that kinda follow through horizontally, I was limited to rotating it a little.
Had I done a bit of research first, I would've found that there are plenty of great ball rigs around that would've solved this problem!
I think where I will go from here is just experiment with some different ball weights and really get into timing and spacing them properly, I may have jumped the gun a bit putting together a little scene.
It's pretty dull and I'm desperate to start animating characters but I'm determined to nail this stuff with balls first. AM doesn't start til Jan so I've got plenty of time!
Thanks again man, you're a great help!
Reference images like this will also help understanding how the ball bounces.
You should start of by identifying the contact and the highest point of the bounce, these are the 'key' frames of the animation and need to be right. Then you need to work on the in between frames, you should probably start by getting the squash and stretch how you want it then the timing/spacing.
Anyway hope ive at least been a little helpful, im still learning myself ;P so im no expert at all
Yep, I have that book. It's awesome, I nearly bought the DVD set too until I realised it's basically a transcript of the book. It looks fun, but it's a lot of money for effectively the same content. I'm not quite finished reading it but I'm starting to try and apply it to my animation.
As mentioned, I've gone back to a simple bounce. It's very WIP, the rotation is way off, but I was focusing on the timing/spacing.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33057988/Animation/Basketball%20WIP%201.m4v
Here's the ref I'm using. I think his ball may be a little flat, but it kinda works. [ame]