The first week of our course training was to do bouncing ball training, a classic introduction to animation, and even though it is a small animation that seems relatively introductory, it is not easy to bring the movement patterns into play and make bouncy balls vividly, so I found draft diagrams of bouncy ball trajectories online to help me better understand and supplement the group!

So I do according to the teacher’s teaching method, first of all, the height of the ball’s fall, the height of the Y-axis in order to do a linear decrease in the height of the landing, after doing the bounce, and then the Z-axis for traverse, the amount can get a complete animation of the ball’s falling body! Then open the animation chart editor and adjust the curvature of the bounce so that the ball can stay in the air longer and more in line with the motion.

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Well, when I finished the series, I realized that even though I had adjusted the ball movement and curves, it still looked stiff and not vivid enough, and when I saw the sketch I was looking for, I knew where the problem was, my little ball didn’t make shape changes, and with shape changes the little ball movement would be more dynamic.

But there’s a problem with doing the little ball deformation.There are two options for deforming the sphere, the first I thought of is using the R key to zoom in and out of the sphere, which is the usual and rather crude way, and the second is to use bindings, which bind the sphere to the controller. Due to time and familiarity with the binding capabilities, I chose the former, but the latter would undoubtedly be the better choice, and I think I’ll optimize this detail the next time I animate a complex scene.

Here is my preview rendering of the effect. I’ve turned on motion trails and animated onion skins (ghosts) to see the motion trails and of course the animation graphs to optimize the animation.