In today’s bolg, we are going to be advancing to a small animated character, the fox, which is said to be a small animated character, but is actually a ball bouncing, with the difference that we will be adjusting the fox’s tail as it bounces.

So by the same logic, since the fox body is still a ball and the model is pre-bound to bounce deformation, which is what I was trying to say in last week’s ball, we do not need to make bindings here and just focus on the character dynamics.

I looked for references to the storybroad of fox bouncing and drafts of trajectories, and found that to adjust the fox’s tail properly you need to get the tailbone swaying in the right position for horizontal jumping.

So when I made the adjustments, apart from the deformation and orientation of the fox’s head, which is also the spherical body, the tail also conformed as much as possible to the laws of motion, so as not to violate Newton’s laws of motion.

Below is the graph eidtor of my tail node.

I know that this line is still not regular enough, and when I finished uploading the video I noticed that the movement of the tail was quite chaotic, and that the rules of the swing were different for each bounce, but of course in real life the fox’s tail will still be a bit different for each horizontal jump, because of the length and distance, but not this huge difference that I saw, but the difference of the regular swing and then some adjustments will make the whole process more natural and more comfortable to look at.

Next I did a couple of jumping piles in succession, at different heights as well as at different distances, bouncing the fox completely and adjusting the X-axis nodes in the graph editor as we did in the first week to break the nodes and make the arcs more natural.

This is my fox bouncing animation below.

Final thoughts: The right rate of bounce and tail swing with the right posture and speed is the key to a good animation. Therefore I find that I still need more practice in rhythm and node control.

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.

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.