Animation Skills - Exercise 6



Maya Bouncing Ball Animation


After having created a 2D Bouncing ball animation in Adobe Animate, it naturally follows that we should look at 3d Animation. Thus, our exercise was to create a bouncing ball in Maya.
Some initial research was done to investigate animation in Maya and one important concept surfaced – that of rigging which enables animations to come alive and not just move in 3d but move as a series of connected items to enable a complex feature such as a character come to life and move arms and legs in addition to moving simply in a direction.

As a starting point we were given a 3D sphere primitive with a “Rig” already attached which enabled movement in 3 directions and also squashing and stretching. This did make life much easier and I was able to quickly set up a few key frames with movement, squash and stretch which enabled Maya to fill in intermediate keyframes.

In addition, a Skydome light with a background was added to provide a natural looking background and the animation was then tested and run. The animation proved to be quite realistic, looking to me much like a bouncy child’s ball. Obviously, the animation could be adjusted to suit different ball types such as Golf balls which don’t stretch and squash but bounce quite well on hard surfaces.
One of the things I have been learning is that often, something computer generated matches the real world in its physics but doesn’t look right and has to be tailored slightly to achieve a more natural look – but in this case, it does look natural to me.









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